Loopy Car

Developed in ~24 hours for GMTK 2025 with the theme "loop".

Hey Mark, if you read this, please give us the full weekend next time ;)

Goal of the game:

• The game presents a series of puzzles in the form of road tracks and a little car.
• Some pieces of the road tracks can be rotated (these are indicated with dashed yellow lines and a white outline). Rotating the road track pieces will create a different configuration of the road that the car can traverse.
• The goal is to create a loop and have the car go around in it.
• Points are awarded based on the length of the loop and an online leaderboard lets you compare your solution against those found by other members.
• There is an unlimited number of procedurally generated puzzles but everyone encounters them in the same order and therefore the scores are comparable for each level. Ties will be ranked together. Try to climb to the top of the leaderboard!

For the 4th level of the game, both solutions below are valid. The one on the left is worth 3 points while the one on the right is 14 points.

Controls:

• Mouse or touch

Credits:

• Car model CC0 from: https://kenney.nl/assets/car-kit
• Music CC0 from https://tallbeard.itch.io/music-loop-bundle
  
• SFX are all CC0 from https://freesound.org
• UI icons CC0 from https://kenney.nl/assets/game-icons
• Additional UI CC0 from https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pack
• Smoke particles CC0 from https://kenney.nl/assets/smoke-particles
• The road tiles are based on my own free asset pack available here: https://josepvalls.itch.io/hexagonal-tiles (I will update it with the current set of tiles)
• Title made with https://www.textstudio.com/

Future work and known issues:

• The server with the score leaderboards uses a free account and may struggle with concurrency. Some scores may get lost if there is a spike of concurrent players.
• I ran out of time to implement so many ideas. Since I work full time and I am located in the US, most of the work effectively happened in a single day on Saturday. Here are some ideas I wanted to implement:
  • I have most of the code to be able to score circuits/paths based on length, number of unique tiles, number of crossings, speed (by preferring straight segments), etc.
  • I wanted the player to be able to maximize different score components and show a comparison similar to what Zachtronics does in some of their games (i.e. https://www.zachtronics.com/opus-magnum/).
  • I wanted the car to leave a trail or skid marks, both for fun but also to help visualize the current path in some of the harder puzzles.
  • I designed the UI to be simple, minimalistic and cross-platform but I am missing a mobile build. And there are some texturing issues on Android.
  • Additional UI feedback, sound and visual effects.
  • Some decorations in the background.
  • Puzzles with different shapes (both PCG and manually authored).
  • Puzzles with different cars at the same time.
  • A level select screen that persists across playthroughs so the player can revisit levels or jump to the more advanced ones!

Do you also like hexagonal tiles and puzzle games? I've been obsessing about everything that can be done with hexagons; there are too many square tiles in the world. If you also like hexagons, check out my other recennt projects (all under active development) and ping me if you'd like to collaborate on something:

• https://josepvalls.itch.io/blooming
• https://josepvalls.itch.io/ucjam2025
• https://josepvalls.itch.io/the-meta