Hey all,
The next location - a coastal road inspired by California's Pacific Coast Highway - is nearly finished, and release is looking set for August. I'll detail the roadmap for release at the end of the post - first, a preview of the new scenery and vehicles.
New Location: Pacific Coast
After spending years building the environment engine, I've finally been able to reap the fruit and refocus on the core goal of the project: making locations. This is the first true location I've worked on since initial release in 2022, and I'm really happy with how it's turning out. All that work preparing the engine to be flexible paid off; it's taken only a month of effort, with the broad strokes taking just a few days. The bulk of the time was spent developing the unique foliage systems needed for having brush coverage that looks naturally distributed and works at all view ranges. The trees also had some bespoke elements in their system design to streamline handling of the different variants - Coast Live Oaks, Jeffrey Pines, and a California Fan Palm. All of the foliage textures (besides the bark) are hand-drawn, and despite the time pressure it's been a joy to finally work on art again after so long.
The landscape is designed to mimic the California coast, with green mountains dividing ocean and desert. Foliage is richer and more lush closer to the water and in the valleys, but occasionally the road will wind up into the drier hills. The seed will determine whether you're heading "north" or "south", with an equal chance for either. Like with the other locations, there will also be options for off-road trails and single-lane roads. Those elements are still in development, but the goal is to capture the feel of an area like the roads through Tuna Canyon.
Overall, development for the Coast location went as smoothly as I could hope, and it gives me a lot of confidence for the locations that will be coming next. It's hard to choose which those will be, but the goal will be variety - something more mountainous or forested is likely. In any case, I can't wait to get back to work on it after release.
Upgraded Coach & Bike
Like the Coupe, the existing Coach and Bike have had a revamp, with each receiving mirrors and getting rigged for customisation and tuning. In the next few days I'll be working on a couple of new vehicle models intended for the initial release, and will hope to show those off in the next post.
Road to Release
At the end of next week I'll be pausing work on new content and switching to focus on the final steps to release later in August. The temptation to keep adding new features to version 1.0 is strong, and I've been weak to it for the past few months, but with all these new features now sitting ready it's becoming hard to justify further delays. So, here's where I'm drawing the line - the last tasks before initial release will come down to this:
Finalisation of the vehicles and US location
Finalisation of the music player feature
Profiles, stats, and achievements
UI/UX polish and upgrades, especially for controllers
Localisation
Stability, testing, and polish
It feels really close now, and I'll be working as hard as I can to work through this list ASAP. I can't specify an exact release day just yet, but will confirm that in the next news post, along with pricing details.
Ongoing updates
While I have to set a boundary for version 1.0, development won't be stopping anytime soon - once the release is dealt with I'll be continuing through the list as usual, returning to a regular update schedule. The list is long, and priorities shift often, but currently the top items are:
Day/night cycle support
Rain and dynamic weather effects
Highway variants of the existing locations (aka Fast Roads)
New locations and landscapes
Workshop support
Some of these had been targeted for the initial release, and I'm sorry to have to push them back, but rest assured I'm just as eager to develop them as you are to play them. This is the "fun stuff" I've been looking forward to all this time, and once the pressure of release is cleared, I'll be right back to work. And yes, these would all be free content updates added to the core game.
Thanks for reading, and thanks also to all who tried the demo so far and gave feedback - it's massively helped to get things in place for the full release. Despite the delays I'm feeling really happy with how development is going, and I can't wait to share the new stuff.
Not long now,
Anslo