Bugbear Entertainment in a Finnish game developer, that developed and released the game Wreckfest back in 2014.
During the pandemic, my friends and I couldn't spend much time together (obviously). Wednesday night became Playstation games night (and drinking more ridiculous beers. FYI Vibrant Forest's Juicy Pupa is still one of my favourites). After we got bored of GTA online, didn't like Red Dead 2 multiplayer, we found Wreckfest.
2 years later we're still playing Wreckfest (although a bit less), but to keep it more interesting we needed a randomiser. A friend made something in Excel, but it was ugly and was a pain to filter.
I wanted to learn Javascript, CSS and HTML for a while, and this was the opportunity. While it would be interesting to use databases, server side code with a website running on top, I didn't want to pay to host it. I therefore went the json file route.
- The Excel file has data taken from fandom.com - I've probably broken some rules doing so, but I was literally cut-and-pasting data into the spreadsheet (and saving the images in the subdirectory).
- Save the worksheet as a csv file, and then convert it to JSON using something like this website.
If / when new tracks or cars are added, I'll try and update the data.
Pretty much the same process for both tracks and cars:
- Checks which tick boxes are marked and stores them
- Pulls the latest json file and sticks the data into a json object
- Parses each Json object based on the ticket criteria
- Adds index number of any entry that matches the criteria to a list
- Selects a random entry from the list
- Inserts the data into the HTML by querying the JSON object using the randomly chosen index number
I was lazy with the error capturing (i.e. no valid selections), but Hillstreet is one of the best tracks, and the Rocket RX is my favourite vehicles in the game.
- It would be cool to add more features like the different upgrades (i.e. you could specify you want a 250hp car, and it would select a vehicle and which upgrades)
- A car randomiser that takes the number of players and randomoses cars with a simiiar rating the compete with (rather than all being in the same vehicle)