Hello, Bikers! This week we’re diving right back into the inside look at the development of our game. In the last post (you can find it HERE), we wrote about the making of the Hoover Dam. This time we’re talking with Janek Laskowski about the single most important thing in the game: our motorcycle!
We also have a pretty cool announcement to make: we’re changing our logo! We think the new logo suits our game much more and we’re pretty stoked with it. Hope you like it as much as we do!
And now, let’s learn how the team made the bike.
So, Janek, what do you do in Road Studio?
In Road Studio I'm the Lead Programmer. So what does this mean? I make sure that the game runs stable (i.e. no crashes) and that it works just as we designed it to work. I also coordinate the work of other programmers.
As a lead programmer, I also have to somehow "filter" all the features that people try to put into our game. Every team member has their own unique ideas, most of them really good, but in terms of doability I'm the one to say "yes, let's do it" or "no, we can't do it". The latter means precisely "yes, of course, we are super smart and we CAN do it, but it will take us X weeks to prepare so let's try something else". *laughs* If the idea is really good, together with Tomek (Head of Production) we discuss what resources are needed (mostly it's time) and which features should be dropped/pushed back to make "space" for the new one.
Tell us some more about the bike. Is there a particular model you were basing it on?
Yes! We’ve chosen Indian Chief as our inspiration. We considered several more but in the end, we wanted a motorcycle that would fit the theme of the journey. We didn’t want a racer bike or a low rider, like the Harleys, we wanted a bike that you can ride long distances on. We picked a comfortable cruiser and made our own bike.
Cruisers are perfect for long journeys. They’re comfortable, they have a designated space to attach pouches and bags, and it looks nice! I don’t know, the red with chrome-plated elements just seemed like a classic to us. We also wanted our bike to have a classic dashboard. You know, the one with physical arrows and stuff.
Do you want to make other models available later on?
That’d be great. I mean, we will certainly have the one for the journey, and it will be our main bike. But we are considering the idea of introducing some challenges into the game and here a racing or cross motorbike would be awesome to have. You know, to feel the change. A racing bike would be obviously faster, the cross one would be better offroad. But for now, it’s just a loose idea. We want to perfect our primary motorcycle first.
How about customising your bike, then?
Customising your motorcycle is very important for the bikers community so it’s also important for us. We want to allow the player to make this bike your own. We will have different paints available, some stickers and decals, you’ll be able to change the fork, put in a different silencer, and more. We won’t have it in the demo but customisation is something that we seriously consider to be available in the full game
How long does it take to make a motorcycle in the game?
A few months. There are two things, there’s physics, so how the bike works, and there’s the design, so how it looks. There is also the sound it makes but that is always the last thing to apply. When we started working on the motorcycle there was only me and one graphic designer. Within 15 minutes he made me a quick sketch, basically a moveable box with two wheels and a steering bar, on which I could test the physics.
That was what we wanted to do first: driving logic. We designed the acceleration, gears, and how much the motorcycle leans on the turns. Then obviously we had to make it work on different terrains, not just on flat surfaces. We also worked on collisions and falling down the bike, we needed to make it look realistic. I mean, if you drive into a wall you’re not going to get catapulted into space, there is such a thing as gravity. All this took us months and we keep working on it still. For example, we want to add sliding and it will take yet more time to do, as different kinds of grounds have different frictions.
Physics was worked on independently from the graphics. When our design team expanded, we started working on what the bike is supposed to look like. Tomek, the same guy who made the Hoover Dam, designed the first iteration of our bike in around one month. Like I said before, designers did some research and chose the Indian Chief as our basis. We put together the physics and the design and then animated it.
So how do you make the driving feel real?
Mostly through camera movements. We did research, watched YouTube videos where bikers recorded their driving with GoPro, and tried to simulate the same kind of movements with our camera. When you accelerate you get pushed back, when you turn you lean in that direction, when you stop, you lean forward.
Of course, we had to take some creative liberties here and there. People usually strap the camera to their chests, not to their eyes, so we had to move the perspective up. And it’s rather unusual for anyone to get into accidents just to film it, so we had to get creative here as well. We saw videos and tried to imagine what it would look like from the first-person view. I can tell you, it wasn’t nice.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading! We wanted to show you more of what’s happening (because that’s a lot!) and now we’re going back to work.
See you later
