ASK ANY FORMULA 1 DRIVER — or fan — what they think of the sport, and they’ll be quick to inform you that it’s nuanced and complex, an exercise in strategy. An upcoming independent racing game, called Vienna Automobile Society, aims to prove that. It boils the excitement and split-second decision-making of F1 racing down to an almost haiku-like minimalism.

This isn’t intended to be a rival to Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport. Instead of dropping you into a hyper-realistic driver’s seat like typical computer and console racing games, Vienna Automobile Society gives players an aerial view of a complete racetrack. From there, you’re not even driving the car — rather, you’re managing its speed and trajectory around the course.

Instead of steering the car with a game controller or keyboard commands, the player tweaks the lines marking the moving car’s path around the track by moving them up or down with the controller, trying to pick the quickest trajectory and avoid other cars. While shifting gears to modulate the tiny, rectangular car’s speed, the player aims the car like a projectile, changing its angle and speed to make the hairpin turn and not fly off the track. All of it encourages you to look at road-course racing from a different perspective: not as a driver sitting in a car, but as a tactician gazing down from above.

“I’m trying to present a more strategy-oriented version of racing,” says independent developer Nic Tringali, whose previous game was a critically-acclaimed text adventure about exploring the solar system. The word-heavy nature of that project left him burnt out and eager to create something that didn’t require any writing at all. So he made an unusual leap from the world of interactive fiction to car-racing simulations.

The latter is still a relatively new interest for Tringali. “I haven’t been watching Formula 1 racing very long,” he says. “That’s what lead me to make the game in the first place.”

All of it encourages you to look at road-course racing from a different perspective: not as a driver sitting in a car, but as a tactician gazing down from above.

He saw his first F1 race in person last year, attending the United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas. Unlike the oval tracks used for many races in the US-based Nascar series, where most of the circuit is a view of the grandstand, Formula 1’s road courses allow spectators to see only a sliver of the track. Tringali realised that the race's most interesting moments were not necessarily playing out on the 30 metres of track visible to him — or any single corner or straight — but across the course as a whole.

“When you pass someone, it’s almost never out of the blue; you’re slowly advancing over the course of multiple corners or laps before you make a daring move,” he says. “Those are the experiences I really want to capture and distill. That’s why the camera never moves—it’s always showing the entire track. Because it’s not just about getting past someone, but knowing where and when to do it.”

Although Tringali looked at iconic Formula 1 circuits for inspiration, the tracks in Vienna Automobile Society — like the controls — are significantly simplified. “I can’t replicate the same size of track that they actually race … but I’m trying to go for similar design principles,” he says.

The physics in the game aren’t intended to mimic real-world racing, either, but rather to capture the urgency of making quick decisions and thinking three turns ahead.

Vienna Automobile Society is slated for release late this year or early next year on Mac and PC, and will be a local multiplayer game for two to four players. Tringali describes the one-on-one races as more of a “duel,” while adding more opponents to the track can incite a delightful mayhem, particularly as the cars crowd together in the corners.

As a relatively new fan of Formula 1, Tringali wants the experience to feel accessible both to the sport's existing fans and to newcomers — a principle that has guided his minimalist approach since the beginning.

“I’m going for a game that feels right, but keeps the input as limited as possible,” he says. “That even people who don’t know anything about it can say, well, there are only a few buttons here to figure out, so I can get a grasp on what’s going on.”

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