Hey, everyone! As it’s been said many times over the years, when we go dark something big is usually brewing under the surface. You probably can tell from the title, but after many grueling months we’re finally ready to unveil what we’ve been creating.

Thanks for everyone’s patience as we bring this insane 6+ year project to its conclusion. This year we’ve been fully focused on wrapping up the large bundle of content to all be released in Distance v1.0. It’s essentially a huge DLC pack with several surprises inside. Since the start of early access, expanding upon our shipped level content has always been the plan, right alongside implementing the long list of promised features from our Kickstarter campaign (e.g. Trackmogrify, ghosts/replays, stunt mode, announcer, etc).

We’re still working with our business partners to determine the release date, so we’re not yet able announce that in this devlog. In the meantime I’d like to cover some of what you can look forward to in Distance v1.0, as well as a few personal notes about the development process.

ADVENTURE

First up, Distance v1.0 includes a full featured Adventure campaign. This final campaign is a reworked and extended version of the campaign currently available on Steam Early Access. To achieve our original vision for Adventure the entire experience is receiving visual, audio, story, and gameplay upgrades.

(example of an upgraded Adventure level; new version above, old below)

In fleshing out the final narrative my goal was to create a unique experience by utilizing emotions not usually found within the racing genre. To achieve that we pursued a minimalist narrative that focuses heavily on atmosphere, mystery, and flow. Some loose story threads remain from the early access version, but in the end it’s a whole new beast.

The campaign in total is about 1 to 1.5 hours long depending on your skill level, so don’t go in expecting an epic. It’s a minimalist narrative experience, with gameplay focusing on the core abilities of your vehicle. The story is simple on the surface, but the deeper you look into it the more you may uncover.



Alongside the visual and gameplay upgrades, I’ve also worked hard to improve the overall soundscape with lots of new sounds, several new music tracks, and dynamic transitions. For a taste of some new stuff, here’s a fresh new track from about halfway through the campaign.

As you’re probably aware I tend to prefer silence over accidentally spoiling something. It’s probably overkill most of the time, but in talking about such a short campaign I’m not excited to give too much away. Hopefully these screenshots will hold you over until we can finally release a proper teaser trailer.

ARCADE

I’m also excited to say that the Arcade portion of Distance is also getting a large overhaul. Not only will we be releasing several brand new Arcade levels with v1.0, but we’ve redesigned the Arcade experience from the ground up. My aim with this redesign was to improve the sense of progression, give more value to earning medals, and make it more interesting to traverse the wide variety of included content.

With that goal in mind, the team came together to create new menus, improve existing ones, and logically group Arcade content as best as we can. After trying a few different progression systems, we settled on something simple and straightforward. Within Arcade there are level sets which can be unlocked by earning medals. We’ve also meticulously gone through each track and updated the bronze, silver, and gold times to be as accurate and consistent as possible.

As I mentioned above, several new arcade levels are being released with v1.0. These levels push our editor technology to its limit and explore completely different visual themes and gameplay than what’s found in the Adventure campaign.

(“Chroma” created by Kristian)

(“Virtual Rift” created by Galen)

Along those lines, I’m also pleased to announce that several of our favorite community-made levels will be directly included in v1.0! Not only does this allow us to highlight some amazing community levels directly from within the game, it’s also our way to share these levels with PS4 players as we won’t have a Steam Workshop replacement at launch. Kristian, Brent, and Galen have also taken time to revamp several of their own levels from Steam Workshop to be directly included in v1.0.

(one example of an included Workshop level, “Inferno” by Backgrounds’)

(Brent upgraded his Workshop level “Neo Seoul” exclusively for v1.0)

By the way if you liked the old menus, don’t worry because they’re still included as the “Advanced” level select menu. It’s even been improved further to include a search feature.

(the Advanced level select menu)

Much like the “Old Levels” in Nitronic Rush, a Legacy level set has been included. It features all of the classic levels from early access, as well as a few levels cut from the final version of the Adventure campaign. Since the changes between the old iterations and the final ones were substantial enough we figured they would be worth including as a fun bonus.

(the Legacy level set in Sprint mode)

In addition to the new unlockable levels in Arcade, we also spent time creating a few cheats that affect appearances or gameplay when enabled. Unlock them by earning various achievements/trophies. We thought this would be a fun way to give achievements more value instead of just being arbitrary tasks to complete. And yes, a few more achievements will be added to v1.0 on top of what already exists in the early access build.

(a few cheats to unlock in v1.0)

Finally, a quick comment on the unlockable cars. Yes, there will be a few bonus cars to unlock by earning achievements. You can change the colors if you like, but no, they do not affect gameplay at all. Here’s a look at the Archive.

(the unlockable “Archive” car)

Hundreds of other smaller improvements have been made across the board, including improvements to the car’s damage system, the cockpit view, etc. Instead of dissecting each one it’ll be more fun to just find those yourself.

LEVEL EDITOR

For all of our lovely level creators, just a quick note on the v1.0 editor. Don’t expect a big v1.0 level editor overhaul but there will be several new features added. This includes access to the features and many new assets used to create new level content, plus a few new addable components.

For example, you can add an Animator Audio or Animator Camera Shake component to your animations. Regarding the new v1.0 assets mentioned above, you’ll have to wait a bit longer since showing them here would give too much away from the campaign.

(some example addable components coming to v1.0)

PS4 DEVELOPMENT

As it’s been for a while now, the PS4 side of development has eaten up a substantial amount of our time. Fortunately we’ve pushed past most of the scariest hurdles, and at a quick glance the PS4 build looks nearly identical to the PC build.

(one of the new Adventure campaign levels running on PS4)

One the biggest challenges we had to overcome was simply hitting our goal of 1080p at 60fps. After some impressive technical wizardry led by Jason, we’ve made substantial improvements to performance across the board for both the PS4 and PC builds.

More than anything we’ve smoothed out most of the rough spots in levels that were pushing the hardware to its limit, so the experience is quite a bit more consistent in each level. This was really important to us from the gameplay perspective because our fairly “twitchy” gameplay really feels subpar at even 30fps, so one way or another we think everyone will benefit from the work poured in here.

(performance graph showing frame rate over time in a new Arcade level running on PS4)

Beyond that, it’s just been a lot of work to support features like leaderboards with replay uploading/downloading, and the various technical certification requirements to allow us onto the PS4 in the first place. There’s still quite a bit of work to do there, so we’re currently evaluating how we can improve our process to wrap those up sooner.

NOTES ON THE DEVELOPMENT

Simultaneously managing public and private builds over the past few years has been a growing challenge for us, so to reach release as soon as possible we’re simplifying things by putting all of our energy into v1.0. Unfortunately that means that there will be no more updates to the Steam build until v1.0 is released.

We ended up taking a long and unorthodox approach to early access, and I understand if there’s been any confusion as to how v1.0 fits into the overall picture. We did our best for a long time to balance the development of both public and private builds, but it eventually became unsustainable to keep that up. Over the past year we’ve gradually transitioned to just focusing on v1.0 content (and tools to create that content), as well as solving the various technical challenges required to release on PS4.

As a result I haven’t had much to say publicly since everything we’re creating is secret, spoiler-filled content. Regardless, I fully acknowledge that I could have done better in terms of communication. The deeper I fell into creating “secret” content like the Adventure campaign, the harder and harder it became to break out of that world and maintain an external perspective of the project.

The reality of Distance as a project is that it’s been fairly overscoped from the start (at least for our team size and skill set). On top of that we do feel a duty to provide something innovative with artistic merit. For us it’s been a continual battle to not only live up to external expectations, but also live up to the standards we have ourselves. Instead of conceding defeat and scaling things back, we’ve continued to face each artistic and technical challenge until we’re satisfied with the final product. I’m not saying this was necessarily the wisest approach, but I hope you can understand how we ended up investing so much time into Distance.

It’s been a long and bumpy process for all of us, but the v1.0 release is in sight and I think you’ll really like what we’ve cooked up. Distance has always been an extremely personal project for us, and as a result I think that you can see our personal passions shine through the final product. I’m extremely proud of my hard-working and dedicated teammates for pushing through endless barriers to reach this milestone. I’m also endlessly thankful to our faithful and extremely patient players who’ve been cheering from the sidelines from the start.

My next blog post will likely be the release date announcement. There also may or may not be a few secrets I neglected to mention here… so stay tuned. Thanks as always for the support!

- Jordan (with everyone at Refract)