Hello! As of this week, we’re about three months into the six months that I allotted for Early Access. I’m slightly ahead of schedule to finish the campaign. There are about 12 tracks left to build, and I’ll need to remake a few of the very old tracks like Rock Loop 1-2 and Turbine Climb, but I don’t foresee that taking up another three months. I have other features I want to add as well, which should take up some more of the remaining time.
Here’s the current roadmap for 1.0, roughly sorted by priority, taken from my project planning backlog.
Need to have for 1.0
Enable TCS for the Lancier if using arrow keys, but vastly reduce grip limit nitro
Finish modeling Vapor City
Finish building the 64 track campaign
Remake a few old tracks
Take out all hot lap tracks
Improve customization UI and split it between the Exo-v2 and the Lancier
Show how many people you beat globally on the race end screen
Have more fanfare for getting a world record
Display unrecorded player times as N/A instead of 00:00:00
Set exhaust backfire light position/count properly for the Lancier
Model end caps for black cutout border wall-less tracks
Add sunset and nighttime lighting to Vapor City
Nice to have for 1.0
Remap car UVs to not be terrible
Add unlockable paint jobs (depends on the above)
Dashboard UI size slider
Add unlockable rims
Add more tow hook charms
Use perceptual audio settings sliders
Will not have for 1.0
Multiplayer. I know, sorry. I’d have to completely rebuild a lot of the game code. This is my first 3D game, I’ve never written multiplayer game netcode before, and I’d rather keep Neodrive as a sharp single-player experience than something with bad, beginner netcode. I want to make a multiplayer racing game after this, but I would need some more time to learn.
Track editor. I’m not completely ruling this out for sometime in the future, but this would be its own very large months-long undertaking. I’d need a complete system for not only building and saving tracks, but uploading them to the Steam workshop. Also, the spline tool I’m using hasn’t implemented runtime terrain modification yet. It’s on their roadmap though.
Mod support. Again, not something I’m completely ruling out for the future with custom vehicle models and liveries, but I’d need to build a pipeline for loading arbitrary assets at runtime, and that’s something I want to take my time and do right. Not that I would have to get it completely right the first time, but based on experience at my day job, API contracts and file schemas that are defined early on with little thought have a nasty habit of sticking around and making your life hard if you don’t take your time to plan out use-cases beforehand.
If you have anything to add to this, or you feel my priorities are misaligned with how you feel about Neodrive, please let me know in the comments. Thanks for all being early adopters! Your constant support and feedback has helped, and is still helping, shape this into a very cool game.