Do your eyes deceive you? Is this an April Fools’ Day joke? Nope.

Finally, after nearly three months of administrative hassle, stress and all-round frustration: GeneRally 2 is Kickstarter-approved and ready for us to flick the switch. As part of our launch plans, we wanted to make the GeneRally 2 Kickstarter Demo available to you to try out – we want everyone to be able to see the effort and dedication that has gone into GeneRally 2 so far, and that will continue from now until the launch of the game, with your help and support! The Kickstarter campaign itself will follow soon, and we now switch our focus to informing relevant gaming websites, blogs and communities about the Demo and the upcoming fundraising period.

Obviously, what we’re releasing today is far from the finished product – on the production timeline, this represents maybe only 15% of the progress to the final game. Lots of the basic systems are in place (car physics, controller support, basic day/night features, etc.), but nothing is in its final state and many of the more advanced features are still to be started. What you see in this Demo is a glimpse of what is ahead: improved visuals, updated handling (allowing for more complex collisions, car types, etc.) and cross-platform support.

We’ve chosen to show you the Demo via the Unity Webplayer to allow us to update it regularly throughout the course of the Kickstarter, without requiring constant re-downloads (we can push out updates/fixes easily and quickly, without even having to announce them). Furthermore, it is the ‘path of least resistance’ for those outside of the GR community, who might visit the Kickstarter page and want to try the Demo for themselves – we believe that the more people we can get to play this Demo during our funding campaign, the more likely we are to hit our funding target. Of course, as promised and expected, the final version of the game (along with the alpha/beta access versions) will be stand-alone products – the Webplayer simply affords us a few benefits at this stage.

So, without further ado:

We’d love to get your feedback on the Demo, so please do get in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ – but we’ll also be keeping our eyes on the Pre-Alpha Demo Discussion Thread on GRIF, and making response there where possible!

Thanks for all your support over the past months, we hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve prepared so far!