Hey everyone! We have some really exciting news (as you likely read from the title), but before I get to it I want to finally post a new Workshop Highlight. This set of levels was chosen by Ellie (aka elcoolbeans). Subscribe and enjoy!
GIF Album: Distance Workshop Highlight #7
- Digital (by Ashamael)
- Dark Rainbow Museum (by Bakoniz0r)
- NightLife (by DeepFriedZombie)
- Lost Fortress (by Ferreus)
- Interstellar Sprint (by CraftingCompilation)
DISTANCE WILL BE AT GAMESCOM
In less than 3 weeks Kyle and I will making the epic trek from Seattle to Cologne, Germany to show Distance at gamescom! We're beyond excited, and we can't wait to meet so many of you that haven't been able to attend U.S. conventions. It's going to be crazy.
As a part of the WIN and Indie Arena booths (hall 10.1, number A 050 / B 051) we'll be showing exclusive, unreleased content including new story mode levels, VR + cockpit view, synced concert lighting, and more. We'll be posting details about meetups, tournaments, and some other surprises as we get closer to the event. Until then here's a teaser of what we're preparing:
Watch: https://vine.co/v/errVX0DuU3x
Looking for Gamescom Volunteers
Since it's just Kyle and myself attending we can use all the help as we can get (especially with events like tournaments). In exchange for volunteering at the booth we can get you special access to the expo and likely some other rewards. If this interests you at all email [email protected] with the subject line "Gamescom volunteer" and we'd love to chat with you.
In any case, stay tuned for more gamescom details coming soon!
Development Progress
Despite miscellaneous gamescom prep eating up a ton of our time, we've still made some major strides in the game. Since a lot of our tasks have been in a grey area of feasibility, we didn't want to establish false hope by broadcasting them too early. Today we're finally at a place where we feel confident enough to share a few items.
Mouse-Controlled Menus
First up, Jason has been working incredibly hard to refactor nearly all of our menus with a singular goal in mind: mouse controlled menus. To do this we needed to upgrade our menu system NGUI (which had been modified substantially), and to be honest it’s a task that no one wanted. It's grueling menial work where at the end of the day if nothing changes you did your job. After 3 weeks he's finally gotten it to the point we're fully up to date, most of our modifications have been converted over, and mouse controls work alongside the keyboard/controller. You can even hold up or down to scroll through menus. It's quite luxurious.
We hope to release it in an experimental build soon. There are some quirks still to work out, but we'd love feedback on the implementation. It's slightly incredible how many menus there are in the game already, but it seems to be a hallmark of the racing genre. At least going forward it'll be much easier to access new NGUI features and improve that user experience.
Unity 5 Experimental Build
Thanks to everyone for the great feedback on the initial Unity 5 builds. It seems that performance and load times have indeed improved across the board. That being said, while certain elements of the car's bounciness can be fun there's still several issues when doing wall transfers and occasionally when landing jumps.
Our plan now is to let Jason finish his work with the menus, and then he’ll immediately move onto Unity 5 physics development. He already has several thoughts for improving these issues, but we figured that completing the menus made more sense in the short term since the game is fully playable.
VR + Cockpit View
Andrew has taken a break from PS4 development to focus entirely on VR + cockpit view. The core idea was that he'd spend one week, see how far he got, and then we’d determine if it seemed like a worthy use of time. Well he's clearly passionate about it and made some incredible progress in that first week. Based on that success he's planning on working on VR all the way up until gamescom where we've choosen to showcase it. Here's a clip of VR in action:
Watch: https://vine.co/v/evVB0ItDnQh
After getting the hood camera functional with VR he spent some time with the 3rd person camera, but it was quickly determined that a cockpit view was a lot more promising. He changed the roof/car screen to be clear glass in cockpit view, added a disconnection between you and the car so that you can feel the weight of the movement, improved the temporary cockpit dash that Jason created forever ago, and added tons of other tweaks to get it feeling engaging. Having a cockpit really does an amazing job of grounding you in the world and preventing motion sickness. Rotations and flying can be tough since you can't see the ground below, but it really just adds a sense of realism to the whole experience.
I think the sense of speed still could use some improvement, and as always there are some quirks, but when you play with VR plus the force feedback steering wheel there's no greater level of immersion. As soon as Andrew improves some of the VR menus I believe he'll be looking for feedback in the form of an experimental build.
Adventure Mode
Finally, one of the biggest developments lately has been in the narrative department. We've been spending a lot of time refining the content of the first few levels in Adventure mode so that it's more engaging and packed with crafted detail, and we'll be showing this for the first time at gamescom. There's been a ton of back and forth working to establish major plot details, backstory elements, narrative devices, etc.
Using this info we're making more informed decisions about how unveils work in the story and what needs to draw your eye. Since it's changing so much I don't want to get into more details yet, but there's tons of new art, in-game cinematic moments, and we're finally wrapping our heads around how the announcer could fit into this mysterious world. Here's a couple teasers:
(trying something new near the start of the campaign)
(improved environment art in Lost Society)
Watch out for news about an impending experimental build on Twitter and/or on the feedback thread. Until then we're excited to read your thoughts on the progress. I'll be streaming Speedy Saturday later today at 11 am PDT on twitch.tv/refractstudios. Hope to catch a round of multiplayer with you there!
- Jordan (@torcht for more frequent dev updates)