Zero Gear - an indie multiplayer kart racing game

Brian wrote a new blog post today titled "The Secret of Zero Gear". An excerpt -

Quote

I'll tell you a secret, Zero Gear is not a kart racing game."

in non-blog-posted news, I am currently polishing our 3 race tracks - Spaghetti West, Champion Circuit, and Chill Mountain. And hope to have some fly/drive through video of each of them soon.

Brian is toiling away on the race mode game rules and system, as well as tweaking some of the vehicle physics setup as we come to better grips with the different types of terrain people will run into.

*edit* finally got around to downloading some of the items other people have been making, here is a get-up made with some of them:

[Blocked Image: http://myzerogear.com/hotrot.jpg]

Thanks for bringing that to my attention. Pretty pathetic that I don't know how long it has been that way. I have so little time these days that devbump has slid towards the bottom of my priority list.

As I have been promising for some time now we finally have a new video for everyone. This video showcases our initial 3 race maps that we are working hard to outfit with all the gameplay gears and gadgets that Brian is developing as we speak. These will be 3 of the 5 maps that we plan to have for our first beta release.

[Blocked Image: http://myzerogear.com/trackvid.jpg]

by the way, if you are interested in being in our initial beta, you might want to join our steam group: http://%7boption%7d

Quote from Mazy

ZAPHOD=GOD

lololol

http://hl-away.moy.su/ee/cs_estate.jpg

need some help / advice:

We will start closed beta testing very soon. We need to be able to support up to 16 players with a very low ping to the SF / Bay Area. A windows server is preferable, and the machine specs can be pretty mediocre as long as the connection is fast. Obviously we need to be able to remote into the machine in order to set up our game server. We would also potentially like to use the server for SVN.

Price: we are super cheap ramen-eating indie game devs, so we really don't have a lot to spend. We are hoping we can find something suitable under or around 100 bucks a month if possible. I have no experience renting servers so I have no idea if this sound like something reasonable. I would appreciate anyone's advice or guidance as well.

I guess SVN is not the biggest issue we will be using it for. It is mostly to host the game servers. I think as far as power, it would be ok to be hosted on one of those game servers which am sure host a bunch of game servers on the same machine, the only issue is that we will need complete access to the box in order to admin/update/run the server software, which I could see being an issue with the people that use shared hosting for common game servers.

*edit* going to email gameservers.com to see what is possible, the ping to the san jose servers is pretty incredible.

Update: We looked into GoGrid tonight. It seems really promising. At least for short term testing.

They host virtual servers which we can bring up and shut down at any time. It will be a lot cheaper if we don't need the server running 24/7 (we won't until a full beta is underway). It seems really fast and has really good ping times to both our locations. It is located in SF and my partner gets a ping of TWELVE to the server. My ping is a whopping 45 from San Diego.

2 new characters, Squiddles and The Brain:

[Blocked Image: http://myzerogear.com/squiddles.png][Blocked Image: http://myzerogear.com/brain.png]