G’day and belated Happy New Year Rat Racers!
Today we’re talking about the content of the next major game update coming; release date is currently TBA but I plan to release it within April this year.
I’ll start, once again, with achievements; I can confirm there are now item-based achievements in development as well as some improvements to them in general! In particular there will be a pop-up in-race when unlocking certain achievements now whereas before you wouldn’t see them until exiting a race when Steam’s Achievement UI is typically triggered. In addition, with the Hats system now in the game, I’ll be introducing new Hats that will be unlockable with the existing progression achievements!
In particular, getting Rat Racing Apprentice will get a special Hat as currently, other than unlocking all game modes, there are no other rewards for this Rank.
Speaking of progression achievements… I’ll admit it.
As the dev of the game, it’s taken myself far too long to unlock “Rat Racing Champion” at 1000 races during my playtesting and given this predicament, a casual player may have a lot of trouble even reaching this goal!
Therefore, starting from the next update to achievements, all progression achievements’ goals will be reduced as follows:
Rat Racing Rookie: Already unlocked at the start. This is the default rank and isn’t visible anywhere unless you open the Player Profile Menu before you finish onboarding.
Rat Racing Apprentice: 5 races. May increase in the future with the introduction of new race environments, existing achievement unlocks shouldn't be affected here.
Rat Racing Conoisseur: 128 races (up from 100 races)
Rat Racing Champion: 512 races (down from 1000 races)
Rat Racing Legend: 1024 races (down from 10,000 races)
With these changes, the game credits will only trigger once Rat Racing Legend is unlocked whereas currently it triggers for Rat Racing Champion as well.
Now it’s time to address procedural generation. (again) I’ve been working on updates to track shape generation to increase the amount of variety for track shapes themselves. In particular, one massive flaw with the current patch is that all race courses generate with a single left turn at the start and finish and always go mostly "to the left." (Shown below, seasoned Rat Racers will be familiar...)
This will no longer be the case come the April update; Races will have a 50/50 chance of generating mirrored, aka. "mostly to the right!"
As you can see with the Beach Screenshots above, on some race environments the road geometry will also flip on a mirrored race course come April! In addition, tracks will now generate “elongated” rather than perfectly “round” which will introduce more interesting track shapes to the game.
With the updates to procedural generation, I can also confirm races with multiple laps will be coming in the April update; The way lap counts will work will be based on the race time obtainable in a single lap, with longer race courses getting less laps and shorter ones getting more. (Up to 3 laps)
“But what about existing replays?” No need to worry; old replays should still work, provided nothing drastic occurs with items as well. Old replays are fully covered using the replay patching system currently.
Speaking of Replays…
Rattus Velocitas Replay 2, a new replay file format, is now in the works!
The current replay system, while it reproduces offline replays 100% accurately, doesn’t work as well for online races, especially in cases where packet loss occurred. Rattus Velocitas Replay 2 will address this by time-correcting all network related physics and item events which should significantly increase the accuracy of replays in online races, while also making offline replays more robust! After this new replay system is in the game, old replays will still playback correctly but new replays will be recorded in the new format.
That is as much as I’m willing to reveal for now as I have a lot more new content planned but not everything may make it into the April update. Depending on release timelines I may even release the new Achievements in a separate update before the major April update.
Happy Rat Racing!