We are Bit Loom, a 3 person Scottish indie dev team, and last month we announced our next game Tray Racers! It’s an online multiplayer party racing game where you play as ragtag kids zooming down randomly generated dune slopes… but what does that tongue-twister really mean and how did we get here from our last game about stretchy double-ended dogs!?
Well towards the end of making PHOGS we were starting to think about what our next project would be. The three of us were slowly trickling out little concepts here and there trying to find that exciting spark when someone in the team (the culprit’s identity is lost to time) said something like “nah, forget Ray Tracing, we’re all about Tray Racing!” and it really stuck.
Resident pun-maker Henry was very keen on this idea and whipped up a quick prototype, we were all surprised to find that we might actually be on to a cool idea if we could figure out how to present it. We started thinking about the types of games we were playing together at the time - 2020 was all about online games and we felt like we could create something small that would be fun and quick for people to jump into.
We had so much fun trying to beat each other's times in that tiny first prototype that we couldn’t help but excitedly start developing it further. We took some time just messing around with the racers, getting the controls and speed feeling fun, fast and intuitive while at the same time playing with the environments and terrain, finding out things like how long felt right for a race and how fast was too fast.
Tray Racers quickly became a space where we could experiment with the format of a party racing game. To make each race as surprising and exciting as possible we iterated on a system to randomly generate tracks. However, this combined with the perpetually downhill nature of racing on a tray meant that the usual format of a racing game (do a number of laps of the same circuit) wouldn’t really work. We settled tracks being long winding slopes passing through multiple biomes, with the race itself being split into a “practice” where you have some time to learn the track and find your best route and then the “final race” where everyone comes together to make it count for one final run.
Creating the crazy world of PHOGS! was an extremely fun experience and we knew we wanted to make the setting of our next game just as vibrant and bizarre. Something about racing down giant sand dunes conjured the image of an apocalyptic world where the current ways of life were gone but there was still a lot of fun to be had in the playground left behind. As such we settled on the concept of a bunch of ragtag kids having fun in a fantastical desert wasteland, one with all the dangers and hardships replaced with the kinds of exciting and crazy things kids might dream up existing in such a world. And of course it wouldn’t be a Bit Loom game if the main mode of transport isn’t being eaten by giant worms…
We have been working hard on every part of the game and are very excited for people to get their hands on the game next year for free on PC and Nintendo Switch. For more updates you can wishlist the game and follow us on Twitter and TikTok! 👇
@trayracers on Twitter
@trayracers on TikTok
Check out the reveal trailer below! 👇🎬