Last time on the developer blog, we gave a broad overview of what we are planning to achieve with the Sequel to GeneRally. We gave you some good insights into our broad plans, but now we’re going to delve deeper. After the first developer blog was published, one of the most frequently asked questions was, “I saw the new object, is the Sequel still going to look/feel like GeneRally?” And so, for this post, we’ll be covering the Sequel’s artistic style, and some technical points surrounding that.

Clarification: The objects shown in the screenshots below are not necessarily one-to-one replacements. In the Sequel, every wall type can have catch-fencing enabled or disabled and there are multiple models for most objects (such as the lamp posts). Don’t worry, we’re focussing on ensuring existing GeneRally tracks remain as compatible as possible!

The GeneRally Style

So, what makes GeneRally what it is? Out of thousands of arcade racers developed over many years, GeneRally is fairly unique – it pushes no artistic or computational boundaries, and it offers nothing that can inherently be described as ‘ground breaking’. What GeneRally does do, and what we feel it does superbly, is master the art of simplicity.

From the outset of this project, one of our core mandates was that the Sequel should retain the artistic style that GeneRally mastered – and so, one of our first steps was to try and decide what features created that visual style. We came up with three major things: simple colours, low-poly models and clean, distinctive environments. It is these three tenets of GeneRally’s visual style that we made non-negotiable: if the Sequel didn’t have those three principles at the core of its visual style, it just wouldn’t be a fitting sequel to the game we’ve come to know and love over the past decade.

Of course, whilst we’d tied down what we knew we needed to allow the Sequel to be a thoroughbred successor to GeneRally, there were (and still are) the possibilities for adding to and improving upon that tried-and-tested formula. Obviously, with a decade’s worth of progression in technology, there are a great many new possibilities, and we hope to cover a few of them over the course of this post.

What We’re Keeping

The first question most people want to know the answer to when anyone talks about a sequel to anything (be it a game, movie or anything else) is “what’s different?” – however, we’re going to save that for later, and first of all tell you what’s going to be the same and why. We’ve already talked about our three major tenets of GeneRally’s artistic style, but now we want to get into some particulars and give you a little bit more detail.

First off, tracks. We’ll be retaining the tried-and-tested land-map & height-map pairing – we feel that this gives a huge number of opportunities to track-makers, without a big barrier to entry. At present, anyone can open the track editor, create a track, and have something that looks fairly good in-game in next to no time. The various ‘painted’ surfaces are easy to work with, easy to improve upon and, most importantly of all, small in file-size. Whilst we’ll be adding a few extra surfaces (e.g. blue tarmac, to increase those land-map creation options) and increasing the size of the maps a little, all the basics you’ve come to expect will remain.

Objects. Over the years, there have been numerous requests to allow custom objects for tracks, but in reality, that’s just not something that fits with the style we’re going for. We want people to make the most of the resources they have, and come up with superb creations (think back to the first time you saw someone make something interesting out of boats or office blocks, for example). To that end, the objects in the Sequel will remain limited and hard-coded and old objects will retain their dimensions. Furthermore, whilst the object model poly-counts will be increased (see some of the screenshots in this post), we will be ensuring that they remain simplistic in style and mimic a similar level of detail on today’s machinery, as GeneRally did back in 2002.

Cars. In a similar way to objects, we’ll be increasing the poly-count on cars. We haven’t yet tied down a number, but car-makers can expect to be able to model a few extra details on their cars in the future. We’re hoping to increase the poly-count here in line with the objects, to maintain a similar style/feel, and we’ll be adding extra features to cars themselves (lights, etc.). Whilst we’ve not yet made a decision on the classic GeneRally-style spherical wheels, that’s something we’re very keen to preserve if we can!

What We’re Changing

Of course, there’s no point in creating a Sequel only to make everything a 1:1 representation of how it was before. We’re enthusiastic about the possibilities for new features that don’t detract from the essence of the Sequel, but serve to make it a far superior game to its predecessor. Whilst we can’t go into a great amount of detail at this stage (we’d rather not promise, then fail to deliver), we can tell you about a few visual features that will definitely make their way into the Sequel.

One of the biggest features we’re going to be bringing to the Sequel is dynamic lighting and shadowing. Instead of the static, modelled shadows in GeneRally, we’ll be generating shadows on-the-fly based upon the position of dynamic lights in the game world. What this will allow for is a huge wealth of options for drivers, competition organisers and screenshot/video aficionados. At the moment, we’re working on day/night transitions, to allow for full round-the-clock racing.

To go with our dynamic lighting, we’ll also be bringing a simple weather system to the game. Rain, clouds and baking hot sun will all combine to have an effect on both the visuals and the car’s handling. This has been one of the frequently-requested features over the years, and we’re looking forward to seeing how it will be received by the community at large. We’re hoping to have some preliminary screenshots of this system making their way to the blog over the next few months.

We’re also going to be adding a few new objects (and possibly more post-launch in patches), and giving all of the older objects a visual re-work. Whilst, as we said above, we’ll keep their dimensions the same, we want to make sure that even older tracks (imported/converted to the new track format) will look impressive in-game. Hopefully, the hundreds of thousands of tracks created by the community over the past decade will still be favourites in the Sequel!

There’ll be more on these and other features in a future developer blog.

So there you have it – we hope you’ve enjoyed this little insight into the development of the Sequel. We hope that by the end of Spring 2013, we’ll have details on project funding for you – so stay tuned (and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed and follow us on Twitter) Our next developer blog will feature a short interview with our new team member, and a look into the work he’s been focussing on these past few months!

– James