Today's blog post is going to cover the upcoming Christmas Update, as well as talk a bit about our progress towards online multiplayer, and what you can expect from the next couple of months!
Christmas Update
Before Christmas, we'll be launching the GeneRally 2 Christmas Update. This update will include a variety of small features and fixes, but also some themed additions to help you celebrate the holiday season in style.
Most notably, we'll be adding a new track, and a selection of new objects (including static cars, vans and trucks) and some winter-themed variants of existing objects.
Online Multiplayer
Work continues on the online multiplayer feature, which is coming along nicely and is beginning to have all the features and functionality we envisioned it having at its initial release.
At the moment it's possible to race with your friends (or complete strangers) in single races - or in championships - online. We still have some way to go and our focus at the moment is now particularly on the additional functionalities like synchronising tracks between players, and handling mid-race disconnections.
After this, we'll have some UI finalisation to do - and then we hope to conduct a couple of invite-only tests before launching multiplayer sometime after the New Year! Stay tuned here, and on Discord, to find out more about the invite-only tests 📧
What's Coming Next?
We're continuing to follow our roadmap and our plans for GeneRally 2's Early Access period - and we're on-track with where we expected to be at this point. It's our intention to launch out of Early Access within the first half of 2024 🏆
Still outstanding on our pathway towards a Version 1.0 release are the online multiplayer, a couple of cars, improvements to the AI, and a variety of smaller bug fixes and features.
In the year leading up to the launch of Early Access (and for a couple of months afterwards), we were really lucky to be able to have such a large team working on GeneRally 2. Now, our team is much more modest in size (only three of us are working actively on the project) - a result of the basic realities of independent game development.
However, as we saw the possibility of this from afar, we set our Early Access goals conservatively, to ensure we could reach them even with a smaller day-to-day team.
What this means is that prioritisation becomes the most important factor for us in delivering content and feature updates. Right now, our focus is on delivering the online multiplayer, and then we'll be able to turn our attention to the other items on the list!
Of course, this also makes now a great time for us to say thank you to the team members who have helped us along the route, but are no longer working with us on a daily basis: we are so grateful to you guys for your contributions to GeneRally 2 over the past couple of years 😊