Guts and Glory: Death in Happy Valley news

Nestled between grassy hills and tall evergreens lies the small town of Happy Valley, with their perfect houses, perfect people, and perfect little lives. This is the hometown of John Doh and his young son Jimmy, where they enjoy their days riding bicycles and enjoying the fresh mountain air. Little do they know, they have also been selected to participate in the Guts and Glory Games, which can start without a moments notice!

Happy Valley will be just one of the "official" Maps in G&G, and will most likely be part of the first alpha test builds. The other Maps will focus around the themes of other characters or just interesting settings in general. Of course, once I get a Level Editor built, everyone can create all of the Maps and Tracks they want, or just build Tracks on these pre-built Maps.

I've also built several Tracks for the bicycle. These range from very easy to kinda hard... at least I think so. It's difficult to judge how difficult things really are when I build them myself, and I would like to add some more levels that really take things to the extreme, for those that love a really good challenge. Oh, and I also added a short and fun tutorial track to teach the basics.

Down the road, I plan on adding the ability to add parked cars, destructible props and, of course, some NPCs. These won't be part of the Map though... just things that can be added to any level.

As I've been building these Tracks, I've come to the realization that this is less of a "racing game" and more of a "obstacle course of death" game, with vehicles. Having that mindset has really helped in how I design the courses... err tracks... or levels, or whatever you want to call them. Building the tracks has been one of the funnest parts of development ("funnest" is a word now, right?) I have lots of ideas I want to test out, but I really need to stop messing around with levels and finish the rest of the things on my to-do list so I can get this out to playtesters.

I also finished the waypoints system, complete with HUD, which makes building any type of track possible and easy. It also allows me to design levels that require players to directly through the most dangerous parts, if I'm feeling devious. Also added the ability to respawn quickly at designated checkpoints, so you don't have to start over from the very beginning of long or challenging courses.

For those that haven't seen it yet, I've also added a lot of other content since my original announcement article here on IndieDB, such as a family car, speed boosters and mega fans! You can check them out in the videos below ("Crashing the Family Car" is the most popular video so far):

Early alpha testers will be selected at random from newsletter sign-ups at HakJak.com in the very near future. If you sign-up, be sure to whitelist hakjakgames@gmail.com so nothing ends up in your junk mail (don't worry, I will never spam you).