Grand Tour Cycling

Sometimes it takes compromising yourself to finish a thing. It could have been compromising photographs, but I settled for just compromising my coding standards. Any time someone finishes a creative project is a feet worthy of credit; the creative process is not friends with the concept to completing things. There’s always something new and shiny, or a real life distraction.

It’s taken a while for me to complete a new project and I don’t really have a reason for not having done so. I nearly entered a few game jams since my last release, and even started laying out some code - but between a mix of the game jam windows and real life activity not being entirely compatible; or my desire to only publish quality code, I did not complete those jams.

In the end the trigger was playing a board game with a friend, and afterwards thinking “I wish I could play that again, but bigger”. It was the board game Flamme Rouge which is a rather excellent cycle racing game. It’s not a sport I hold any interest in whatsoever - but the game mechanics are fascinating: It’s a trick taking game without any tricks and without any taking, a maths puzzle but with no puzzle and no maths… Flamme Rouge is a fascinating game mechanic: You have a deck of cards with numbers 2 to 9. You want to play only high cards; but things are in your way - and you don’t get your cards back after playing them.

So I made the board game into a computer game and wrote 5 AI to play it against. Well, one AI with 5 variations. I wrote a procedural track generator.

I had most of it done in the first day, finished off some bugs the evening after, then I spent a another evening making it pretty; and a little bit more time throwing a minimum effort UI in after that.

It’s not a complex game, the code is a mess. I wanted to play it more than I wanted to release it. Maybe that’s what it takes to finish a thing? The desire to play or use the finished thing you are making? I didn’t care about the code quality because I just wanted to play a big race, which I did. (I lost by the way).

It turns out Flamme Rouge plays best with about 8 cyclists, but I added stand-ins for every team in the Tour de France, because of course I did. I even applied the correct jersey colours - but at the end I had one more team than sets of colours - I had probably skipped a jersey somewhere on the list and every team after them is likely in the previous teams jersey colours… Oh well.

I thought about adding more to it: Pretty scenery; real track gradients; A save game; multiplayer support; custom team colours; more configuration options. But then it dawned on me - if I do that then I will never finish it.

And I wanted to finish it, because the creative process never stops - if you don’t finish a thing then you never will because the next thing beckons you. Sometimes you have to finish - and finishing means throwing things together however they fit, even if underneath it’s all rubber bands and frayed string.

I finished a thing.