Create some atmosphere

[Korodny]

While the game mechanics are spot on and DustRac is a lot of fun to play, it often feels a lot more like a tech demo than an actual game: it's lacking atmosphere, or character or whatever you want to call it. Some of that is down to the lack of music and the utilitarian graphics, but there's more to it IMHO.

I'll use this issue to list a bunch of things I can think of. This is me brainstorming, so I'm not going to open a dozen or so issues:

• I want to race people not sprites - so give the other racers names (and, in a perfect world, little portraits and distinct paint jobs for their cars).
• my achievements like lap records etc. should be recorded in my name - let me enter my own name and save it for future use with the other settings.
• let me select my own portrait picture, or maybe even import it.
• save names with any records - that includes AI player's names, should they hold or set a record.
• show a proper standings board once a race is finished, and (in a perfect world) some sort of interlude showing the presentation ceremony if I finished in the top three
• don't force me to start at pole position once I won a race. Let me pick my starting position, or have me run a few qualification laps on an empty track to determine my starting position
• Grand Prix: group several races (4, 6, 8?) into championships. Maybe turn it into a league system: three or four leagues (easy, medium, difficult), 4 tracks per league, best racer gets promoted, worst gets demoted, player starts in lowest league?
• let me create my own Grand Prix with my favourite tracks
• (optionally) enforce pitstops even for really good racers, by introducing fuel consumption and fuel tanks that hold fuel for only about 60% of a race
• career mode: tires, fuel, repairs (due to crashing into obstacles) a better engine and a faster pit crew cost money. top positions earn money. combine with either Grand Prix or a separate race-as-many-tracks-as-possible-before-you-go-broke mode.

[juzzlin]

Yeah, I know :)

There's this old issue #13 that would make it much easier to do things like this. However, the sad state of affairs is that I just don't have time to make big changes to this game at the moment.