So, you’ve heard from Markku and Kimmo about their responsibilities in the development of the Sequel – but today it’s my turn! Over the coming few weeks we’ll be increasing the frequency of these blogs, as we approach the launch of the Kickstarter campaign.

Whilst Markku has focussed entirely upon the code-base, and Kimmo has focussed entirely upon visuals, I’ve ended up as a jack of all trades, working on a variety of different aspects of the Sequel’s development. As with any software project, there are gaps to fill, toolkit functionality to write and lots of project admin work to handle. As such, this blog post serves as a summary of a few of the additional things we’ve been working on.

Track Importing

A major part of my recent focus has been upon ensuring that GeneRally tracks can be safely imported into the Sequel. From the start it has been a priority for us to ensure that we don’t make the tens of thousands of GeneRally tracks obsolete. There are a number of complications associated with importing older tracks, not least of all the increase in land-map and height-map resolution for the Sequel. Trying to ensure that GeneRally tracks still look good in-game has been an immense challenge and is one that we still hope to make improvements upon going forward. The screenshot in our last blog post is an example of the quality of imported GeneRally tracks, and we hope to ensure that all imported tracks will exhibit a similar quality straight out of the box and make full use of the new lighting and weather effects.

Particle System

Whilst Markku has been responsible for the majority of the core graphics-engine features, I have been responsible for the visual effects and particle system in our new engine. This has been one of the biggest performance considerations for us, due to our desire to keep system requirements really, really low by today’s standards. GeneRally handled all effects (tyre smoke, dirt, water spray, etc.) through simple circular camera-facing sprites, which were quick to draw but which ultimately led to quite low effect fidelity. This effect style suited the original GeneRally perfectly, with the very simple colour palette and shading, but would have looked massively out of place in the Sequel alongside Kimmo’s superb new objects and Markku’s incredible new lighting engine. The new particle system retains the simplistic style (mostly utilising circular particles), whilst allowing for more complex options such as variable size and opacity, and soft edges to create more natural-looking tyre smoke and water spray. Add to this the tie-in to the new lighting system, and the Sequel’s particles really add an air of ‘beauty’ to those powerslides into the sunset!

Project Funding

Finally, I’ve been exploring our various options for project funding. Whilst we have now settled upon funding via Kickstarter (which you can find more information about on our Contribute page), there were a variety of options we looked into to ensure that we can deliver a high-quality project to the community without taking the next 5 years to complete. Ultimately, we’ve opted for a method that provides good security for both you and us. If we meet our funding objective, we’ll receive your money and have a commitment to delivering upon our project promises in a specified time-frame; and if we don’t, you’ll keep your money and we’ll be able to explore new options for delivering the Sequel to you. Furthermore, this process has involved us trying to design meaningful funding tiers, that we hope will cater to everyone: GeneRally veterans and Kickstarter newcomers alike.

And More…

Going forward, my focus will be shifting on to the Sequel’s weather effects and UI from the start of next month, whilst Markku will be continuing to iterate upon the graphics engine and working on car and object physics. We hope to have a playable early alpha of the game into the hands of a first wave of donators a few months after the end of the Kickstarter process, when we’ll have available time to respond to the wealth of feedback we’re hoping to receive and provide daily improvements to the game build!

If you haven’t already, please consider following us on Twitter (@Gene_Rally) – we’ll be posting more and more updates there, and on this blog, as we ramp up towards the beginning of our funding process, and onwards towards the closed alpha test in Q1 2014. Thank you for your incredible support so far!