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The Making Of Matica Air Race - Part 5 Finishing Up

Many years ago in the 90's Alex launched a Java Racing Game, and there was a player who was getting an incredible time on the high score table. [The story is related to this game, bear with us].

Alex figured he had hacked the high score table, so he changed the game to encrypt the score. He was amazed to see him back on the high score table the next day with similar times.

Alex was so intrigued as to how he was getting the score he spent a long time reprogramming the game to record the movement of the car for every player and send the data to the database.

When our super player next played the game we had a recording of how he played the game. Alex was so impressed when he watched back the recording.

The race was 3 laps, and to clock a lap Alex had put a zone at the starting grid and another around half way around the track. A lap was counted when the game detected the car had passed through both zones.

Somehow, probably through trial and error the player had figured this out. It was much quicker to go to this zone and turn back rather than complete the lap and this is exactly what this player had been doing. Alex remains most impress with this mystery player.

Now back to the Air Race Game. Alex grew up on Coin-Op games which always had a demo mode of the game being played. We try to do this for all of our games, we feel it's a sign of quality and can do more than pages of instructions to explain how to play the game. We use the exact same method he used all those years ago to record one of us playing the game, and play it back for our users in Demo Mode.

We can reuse this code to allow players to race alongside other players on the high score table. But we can go even further if we reuse the code that converts whole tracks into text. We can turn recordings of player's races into text and allow people share that with their friends and other players.

If you Ace a level you can send your race to a friend and they can try and beat you.

We obviously needed sound so set about creating some very simple sound effects. We fired up FL Studio to compose a simple soundtrack, but the game was almost 400k already so we didn't want to add to the filesize with music.