u/joopsle

Hey all,

I'm making a sci-fi arcade racer and recently got a bit of funding, so I'm now looking pretty hard at which features are actually worth prioritising.

I'm trying to judge how important local split-screen still is to racing game players.

If an arcade racer looked like something you'd otherwise want to play, would split-screen make a meaningful difference to whether you'd buy it?

Also, if you do care about it:

• Is 2-player split-screen enough?
• Would you expect AI racers to still be present?
• Is it a nice bonus, or something you actively look for when buying racing games?

I'm particularly interested in opinions from people who play arcade racers rather than serious sims.

Also, you guys are probably already across this, but Steam Racing Fest is next April.

I am also intending to do async races or leagues - (as I loved it in Dirt Rally) - would love to hear if people find that appealing.

Ta muchly

ps.. I'm a long time gamer, my particular racing things are Wipeout, GT4 (I liked 7, but preferred 4s campaign a lot, dunno if thats me being old) and Dirt Rally.

10

I am sharing this, because I have found that I tend to try out more stuff with AI, after discussing what people have built with it, and I think others may be interested in rolling their own.

At the end I will outline the steps I followed to do it.

The result : I built a small UE5.5 editor/MCP bridge that lets Codex inspect and reason about the structure of my Blueprints. (Not generate new ones, it can edit them, but I am not trusting it with that yet and it wasn't the main driver)

Note : I am on 5.5 and do not yet want to migrate to 5.8, which has experimental MCP support.

The reason : In my day job I am gradually embracing AI for bigger and bigger leaps (And for free time quick projects I am fully vibe coding). I really wanted to use it for blueprint work (Specifically reviewing, analysing and suggesting).

I thought this would be a good test of both "structured vibe coding" and how well it could understand Unreal internals and blueprints. It took less than a day, and by the end of it I could do the workflow I wanted. Write a question like "How would I need to restructure my Pawn object so it could be ready for AI bots and multiplayer".

And it produced a detailed analysis, correctly centered around "start off by using controller, like you should have done from the get go".

I then got it to build a multi step plan for the migration, which I am doing and it is checking.

This is perfect, I don't actually want auto generation of blueprints yet (I will get there, but I want to grow into it).

Steps I followed to do it.
- In chat gpt, I was just briefly noodling about training AI models to fly characters, and then I asked
"I have a lot of logic in blueprints, how can I get ai to analyse it - look for current best practice and favour epic solutions"

- It wrote an essay, we had a couple more chats about possibly editing (it suggested co-opting the copy/paste mechanism).

- I had it take a beat to take a cold look and evaluate existing plugins, it came up with options, but I decided to make this so I didn't have a dependency and for the learnings.

- I got it to write up a plan in a single md file

- I pasted the md file into my obsidian vault (local wiki), and then switched to Codex.

- I had Codex break up the design into small milestone docs, then worked through them one at a time.

- A few hours later, I ran my first real analysis of my somewhat portly pawn class and supporting classes.

I was genuinely amazed, I was pretty sure this was going to be a bit of a waste of time, but with some learnings.

Architecture
- The plugin extracts Blueprint structure into an AI-readable index, so Codex can cheaply search that first, and exposes functions for fetching full live Blueprint graph detail only when needed.

AI Versions used
- Chat GPT "High"
- Codex Sol Light (I have not been impressed with Terra).

I'm not planning to share the source, as there are already people building and supporting proper general-purpose plugins. For me, the value of this exercise was building something tightly matched to my own needs and learning how it all worked.

Hope this is useful to someone.

ps.. my setup on all projects is now a repo with an Obsidian vault in it. At the level I'm currently using AI in Game Dev, it gives me a nice sense of reviewability and control. (And means I can easily diff the documentation as it is all md files).

pps.. Currently I am happy vibe coding tools, but don't want that shiz near my game code.

Happy to discuss any questions or thoughts people may have!

Last weekend I ran my first Daggerheart adventure for three friends, and the collaborative worldbuilding was probably my favourite part of the session.

It also trashed one of my planned obstacles almost immediately, and made the entire journey look somewhat unnecessary. Apparently Tolkien and I struggle with the same tricky story beats.

Daggerheart giveth, and it takes away

I had prepared a Celtic/Norse-inspired setting with a relatively grounded tone. Then we started building the world together. The players came up with a crystalline forest with a faerie village beneath it, an order of Fauns whose library is designed for leaping between levels, and a legendary mountain that might be a sleeping dragon, tended by Drakona shrine attendants.

It was much more high fantasy than I had imagined. I had intended the Fey and Norse realms (Vanaheim, etc) to contain most of the overtly fantastical elements, but I loved what the players created, particularly how ravenously they fed off each other’s ideas.

The resulting party was a Faerie, a Seraph and a Faun - two flying characters and one extremely good leaper.

Unfortunately, my adventure began with: “Take this mask from one village to another while a furious river god stands in your way.”

The immediate response was:

“Can’t we just fly it there?”

Awkward pause... "Ummmmmm"

Everyone was a good sport, and we improvised a reason the mask needed to remain close to the land.

Crossing the raging river was also supposed to be a major challenge. I had become so absorbed in the players’ ideas - and in letting go of my original assumptions about the setting - that I hadn’t stopped to reconsider the adventure around the freshly baked characters’ abilities.

For future adventures, I will have to think a bit more creatively about open-terrain challenges!

I also made the final ritual more mechanically complicated than it needed to be. I had several ideas that I wanted to introduce later and got overexcited and kind of jammed them all in. :)

For a first session, a few straightforward encounters and more room for improvisation would probably have served me better.

So, next time: simpler mechanics, shorter notes, and five minutes after character creation to reconsider anything that assumes the party is full of pedestrians.

I definitely want to lean further into the shared worldbuilding, though. That was brilliant.

Anyway, we had a great time and I’m really looking forward to the next session.

The bit I haven’t figured out yet is how to keep travel and terrain interesting with two flying characters. Any thoughts would be appreciated!

First time GM, I am looking for feedback or hints on how to get this my idea to land emotionally.

The adventure concept is Seven Samurai/3 amigos - "village is under threat, players rally and prepare the village and then have a big fight"

I am planning on using social encounters and environments in the build up.

I have one NPC I want to really land emotionally.

He's a big fella (lets call him Bruce), everyone in the village knows him, trapped at the bottom of a bottle, hidden past, village drunk kinda chap.

Players have a social encounter with him to recruit him, this then sets some hidden notional counter about how inspired he is. It also probably reveals that he is a fallen paladin/priest type fellow.

It goes however it goes, but on the day of the fight, he isn't there, he's commatose or missing or in some way not present at the start.

Anyhoo, fight happens - ideally the players completely forget about him, then at some point - ideally when they are under the hammer - he enters the fray...

Clad in ancient vestmens or old armour, he storms in and in some way takes pressure off the PC's (and shows competency and if not complete sobriety enough to show that they convinced him to join the fight, so it's their win). Ideally he offers to hold an area/ entrance way (Swinging around some large weapon probably)

**This is the "bit"***

Fight continues, and then when they are next feeling very pushed ...

I spend a fear.

"Bruce is fighting heroically, behind him you see one of his assailants spring towards his exposed back, with a vicious looking knife".

Ideally the players are like "nooooo"

Then I say....

"I spend a hope, the hope you gave him"

Everyone breaks into emotional tears, lifelong memories formed, etc.

"And a spectral figure parries the blade"

Then he probably continues fighting alongside the spectral form of his fallen companion/friend/dog or something. (The person whose death caused his fall from grace)

What happens next I will kind of let play out. (I am playing with a group who know each other mainly through improv comedy, so I am going to massively be leaning into lettting them steer the story anyway).

Any thoughts on how to run the social encounter to recruit him?

Am I over engineering/rail roading?