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The Tomb Realm

For a first track this is incredibly good. It has a lot of issues, but it has a lot of really good aspects to it so I hope ya keep it up.

I’ll also say up front I’m not particularly fond of most acceleracers tracks in Distance. I do like the settings and they tend to have good visuals, but the gameplay doesn’t tend to translate well when being faithful to the source. So take that how you will.

Pros for this track
-great visuals (most of the time)
-well made set pieces and strong consistent theming.
-a few fun and interesting segments to drive
-original level

Cons
-wildly inconsistent difficulty
-some long stretches with next to nothing happening
-minimal hazards that only exist in limited sections
-some barren rooms, more an issue when not much is happening driving wise
-un capped splines (hurts the otherwise great quality of visuals)

Now, I am going to nitpick some here, but please keep in mind this is because there’s a lot that I really do like about this track, and would love to see you improve for the next (hopefully several) tracks.

The aesthetics, visuals and set pieces are generally pretty darn good. It did feel like an acceleracers realm, without falling into too many of the pitfalls that many of them do. The very early part of the track isn’t particularly interesting, but that’s more to do with the theme and physical setting. With all of the cool looking stuff hidden inside the tomb, so fair enough.

That said, there’s a lot of effectively dead space. Most of the track feels like driving on auto pilot. It could really use some hazards to navigate to keep things interesting. Downtime can be fine, but the pacing was all over the place, going from 0 effort to 100 in a select few areas. Generally, you want either obstacles to navigate regularly, or cool new things to look at. Easy section to give you time to take in a cool set piece is totally fine. You did do a good job incorporating the track with a lot of the cool props so I could really see em and feel like driving through the space, and not just a track with cool things stuck around it.

The first narrow hallway is pretty good. Feels like the walls are closing in, and the pop ups give you plenty of time to react and adjust course. The rest of the narrow halls were terrible. Thematically cool, but gameplay sucked. Gameplay trumps cool ideas. Unless it’s really really spectacular.

Those narrow areas are too narrow and too tight to drive in a reasonable manner. Another problem is the guard rails are scaled down too much to actually prevent going over the edge at all. Unfortunately you can’t scale track splines on different axis to fix that. Best bet would probably just make the road way wider than the hall and let it actually go through the wall. Being able to slip between the road and wall and get crushed, or fall out of the level, feels bad. Also those hallways need to be wider or something.

It’s not even a problem of them being tricky to navigate or require slowing down. It’s that they’re so at odds with the difficulty and demands of the entire rest of the level. Almost everything else is incredibly easy to navigate going full boost ahead. Then you got these deathtrap sections that aren’t even killing you with explicit hazards.

I know it can be hard when you have a really strong artistic vision for how parts of a level should be designed. But you gotta play these through and make sure they actually feel good. Particularly compared to a game like Trackmania, which I myself enjoy as well, I know there are some ideas that are really cool, that just don’t really work out for Distance.

Which leads to another big point. Design your tracks for the game it’s in. There’s so much Distance offered that the current track makes no use of. I know, I know, Acceleracers is a much more traditional driving experience. But you’re making original tracks. I can understand when people are trying to stay 100% true to the source, but I have different standards when it’s an original creation. Plus it’s not like those cars can’t do relatively crazy things too. Not to the same degree but still. Allowing yourself to use transfers and jump required sections and stuff will really open up your options and make it much easier to create a consistently interesting play experience. Frankly, it’s one of the hurdles in making tracks for distance. Getting over the fact that honestly, the fully grounded basic driving experience, isn’t terribly engaging on it’s own.

Also, please don’t do the unlimited cooldown thing. I get it, I really do. It can be tedious and annoying to place cooldown triggers and such spaced out properly, but it makes the track less prone to really silly skips, and just more engaging. Also at least allow jumping. I’d say don’t be afraid of allowing wings to, but I get the appeal of no wings sections. Honestly limiting things too much makes it harder to keep things interesting. Also despite your best efforts, there are still places you can pretty easily get airborne, and then just float away and skip the majority of the track, because unlimited boosting.

Another thing that as a track creator it’s much better to accept. People WILL skip parts of your track. No matter how hard you try to prevent it. Unless the entire thing is literally inside a narrow pipe, and even then I’m sure someone would figure out how to get forced out of it somehow. Plus restricting play space to that degree just makes things less fun. Don’t worry too much about it. Instead just make the track itself fun to play, and you can try making more incentives to stay on it most of the time. A good one that I know you’ve used, is boost zones to give you better speed if you stick with the track.

So let’s see. I know I’ve gone on far too long already but uh… Acceledrome. Yea those are cool, and nice element to have at the opening. Just keep in mind, since they’re largely the same, they can feel pretty tedious the 51,327th time driving through one to get to the actual track. Seems like lately people have been adding a trigger to skip past it if you want. Not a terrible solution and something to keep in mind. Or if you wanna get fancy maybe try to make one as a cinematic or something? I dunno. Just a heads up. Your intro is neat in it’s own right and works. Only complaint is that the start and end of your track do drag on, and could be shortened up.