Roadmap 2017

Introduction

We released our game with the basic concept and basic game play to be able to check the reaction from our players. Also, we tried to filtering out our target audience during the first few weeks of our release. Our game is targeting those who likes the idea of building their own cars, with the freedom of use any combination. We knew this will cause some sort of confusion for many players who just want to race, others will only see the mechanical parts of the game other will compare our games to other games, where cars has unlimited grips and pre-set super tweaked setups. This was one of the main reason why we decided to release the game with the basics and adding new features step by step. While we are continuously looking after our players feedbacks and try to incorporate their ideas and feedbacks, we do have a long list of features we are planning to do. This roadmap try to give the idea about where the game is going to be evolved in the future.
Indie game development are not the easiest and comes with a very limited advantages only. Some of this advantage is to be able to change our planes, reorganise our priority and avoid deadlines or milestones. This is the reason we are not going to add dates to these features, but only listing them. Also, as always, priority and dates will depends on the players feedback as well. The ideas an plans listed here were part of the original game design and we aim to make most of them ready in 2017, however we keep the right to alter from it if we found it more useful in any reason. The success of this game and how many of these feature will be delivered in 2017 highly depends on our customers: You! More sales and more positive feedbacks which we can use, also means more features to add, to put it into simple math. We decided to make You, the player the one who decides what is good or not, instead of a publisher.

UPDATES

In the following weeks we want to keep up with the weekly updates as we did before. Our goal to fix all those issues, which are essential before adding new contents. Controllers, tires, engine torque, suspensions, weight balance and AI are the most important tweaks we are busy with. Since the game has almost infinite variations of setting up a cars, it was almost impossible, but way to time consuming to test all cases. Now, that we have over a few thousands users, we can see many variations and some problems pop-ups in several cases. We want to fix these first, before we can move on to the next. Later, the plan is to have one update per month, however if we run into some bugs or important tweaks, we won’t necessary wait that long.

NEW CONTENT

Our plan is to continuously extend the game with new content. The goal is to have 1 track and 1 new car per month. Also, we want to add more parts to extend the possibilities of customising the cars.

• new cars
• new tracks
• interior of cars with 3D dashboards and gauges, with new camera mode(s)
• exhaust, turbo, wings, bumpers, lights to name the most common we are planning
• also different versions of existing contents, like gearbox (more gears and automat), motors, rims, and others. These items will be scheduled along to the tracks/cars add-ons.
• new controllers and improvements with wheel/keyboard, add force feedback / vibration
• add road traffic around Noordu
• we are also aim for improving our graphics, however it is still a relative low priority compare to the rest of the items we listed here.

CUSTOMIZATION

We want to give even more freedom to our player to customise they ride. While currently all parts can be swapped and replaced it is not possible to change the properties of a component. We will change these in the future to give some extra customisation available for components as well. These are some of the options we have in our plans:

• build up your own gear ratios for several gearbox
• lower or raise ground clearance for racing suspensions, also change the shocks level
• set toe-in/toe-out and chamber for each wheel
• tweak carburettor base level
• set angles of wings mounted on body
• tire pressure per wheel
• independent paintwork for rims, bumpers, wings

LOCALISATION

Currently the game is available in ENGLISH (with Aussie slang) only. One of our first plan is to have multiple languages, also multiple english versions. We have already a few volunteers to help with translations, therefore these languages have higher priority. Based on our player base, we will add more languages, but currently we can cover these:

• German
• Turk
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Hungarian
• US English

NEWSPAPER

Currently the game has only a newspaper to buy parts or cars. In the near future we are going to add several extra to the newspaper as well as new places to buy/get stuff.

• “Test before buy” option, which allows the player to check/test the cars or parts before they would buy it.
• New places will be salvage yard, where you can buy wrecks or remove parts from them
• shop: where you can buy new parts
• pub: to get hints about good offers, type of cars or parts to use
• secrete locations: wrecks in hidden locations, where player could get parts from wrecks

GARAGE

The garage is a central location in the game and has a limitation of working on 1 car at the same time. Also it comes with a parking area, which has a limitation of maximum cars. Currently the limit is 5 cars and the player will get one more place as soon the player win the Revhead title. Later, we want to give an option to the player:

• buy extra parking places
• extend the garage

This way you could work on multiple cars at the same time without the need of moving your cars in and out. While currently the garage is the only place where you can access to the car and fix / remove / add parts, this will also be less garage dependent, so you can have some mechanical work outside of the garage as well. These features will be tweaked/balanced together with other features like MP, missions (yellow angel) and few others to make more sense.

MISSIONS

Currently we have 1 mission: the tutorial. Our goal however is to add several type of missions, such as:

• build cars: as the tutorial, you would have missions to build racing cars for customers. These builds have to be qualified for the goal. If the goal is to make a car fast enough to reach a speed limit, then you have to build it and test it and reach that speed limit with it. Each building car mission has limitations and goal. You have to balance your work based on them.
• yellow angel: You would need to help out Charlie and assist on locations to fix, pull or help out someone broke down on the road.
• transport: Transport items or people from location A to B.

RACE MODES

We designed our game to have multiple race modes. While the base game already includes the most basics, such as street races, drag races, dirt and circuit, we do have plans to add more type of race modes. In the near future we want to add more types:

• Endurance race, where you have to be able to keep your car in a good condition over a longer period of time. These races are meant to be long, where pit stop will play an important elements.
• Rally stage, where player will be racing on different types of surfaces and combination of roads.
• Destruction Derby, where the winner is the one who either made the most laps or still capable of running. The goal would be to destroy all the other cars, while keeping yours running. Derby would run on the backyard and on a special derby track.
• Speed run, where your goal is to brake the top speed records. This type of race will be on a special track, on a dried out lake.
• Reverse track: we will add reverse direction to each track as well. So you can race in both directions.

CALENDAR

The idea with calendar is to give some meaning of time. First of all it’s about to indicate what is the current date, how much time you did spent in the game. It will also be used for mark special racing events, which are set to a special date. (i.e. some weekend race event on a race resort). These special events will need more attention to pay from the player, to make sure he/she has the right car ready for the event. We also want to add time of the day, with different lighting conditions, which would allows to be able to race from sunrise and sunshine to pitch-dark. This will give more meanings of the car lighting setup and provide new challenges as well.

MULTIPLAYER

Multiplayer would be the biggest and most time consuming add-on we are planning to do. The whole game design was based on multi-role system, specially designed for multiplayer mode. However, we decided to release the game as single-player mode first, to make sure our players are learning what and how and also to allow us to fine tune MP mode. Multiplayer mode will be introduced in multiple steps.

• The PUB: pub is designed to be the central location of multi player mode. This is the “lobby" where you can meet and check each-other times, cars and setups. Also the place for discussion or challenge each-other, advertise race events. As the very first steps to our MP mode, pub will be introduced first as the place for sharing high-scores, best times, best builds, top speed and other similar - single player mode achievements.
• Newspaper: in MP mode the newspaper will share some content, in fact, you the player can put your own parts or cars on sale and others could buy it. Newspaper won’t be a factory, so you have to own each of the parts or cars to put it on sale. You cannot sell more items then you actually own.
• Advertise your work: in the newspaper you can not only sell cars or parts in MP mode, but you can add your own advertisement such as racing events, your own garage or race team to make it more visible for the rest of the players. It would also helps to get your “brand" more known by others.
• Form a team: In MP mode we will introduce the multi-role system, which is about to pick a role and form a team. In this team, everyone would have a dedicated role, such as mechanic, racer, painter, or race manager. Each one of you is good in something and the team is about to add your best. Your team goal is to be able to win over any other team in special racing events. Each of these events will be organised by race managers. Race managers has the ability of rent a track, organise events, set-up fees, manage the team/race and find sponsors to make it happen.
• Calendar will also contains shared events, based on the players or team background.
• Garage work: in MP mode you would have the options to work for others, so any other player could drop by and give his ride to you to fix it or tweak it. You could make special deal for fixing or building up a race car.
• We are also planning a way of working together on the same car, so you can have more mechanics in the same garage and working on the same car.
• Street races: obviously, you can also challenge others from any parking places. Just stop at the location and wait for others to join.

PLATFORMS

The game is available on Mac and Windows at this moment, but we have plans to release it on more platforms. PC based platforms is the first we will address, which means Linux is coming soon. Consoles are in our target, but would requires some modifications to support seamless gameplay. (ie. full controller support for menus), and mobiles are due to their limitations might requires us to alter the gameplay. Therefore, we have some other cool ideas how to include mobile platforms later.

• LINUX
• Apple TV
• PS Vita
• Playstation
• XBox
• Mobiles (iOS/Android)

STORES

We want to release the game in multiple stores. Currently the game is available via Steam and Mac App Store, but there are many more which we will address in the short future. Some of these stores will use the steam installation, while others has their own store and installation features. We find it important to note here, because some steam dependent features might not be in our focus, instead we are aim to a global solution where it is possible.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Most of the stores allows or features some achievements, trading cards, workshops or cloud based saves and more. We want to support most of them, however we want to make sure the game equally addresses each stores and platforms. Therefore some of the options you find in steam might not be supported, instead a more “global" solution will be used. Such steam features are cloud saving or workshop, which we try to integrate into our game and into multiplayer mode / servers.

EXTRAS

The idea of Revhead is to make “Noordu” from a small town to a big one. More people will join to play in MP mode will make more and more houses, shops, garages, etc. as well. We have many ideas how to extend the current game-play and separate some of the existing one into more dedicated jobs. Some of these ideas listed here:

• Paint shop: paint work would not be part of the garage anymore, but in a paint workshop. Instead of having the quick paint options as it is now, you would work out a lot more like in real life with attaching decals, mix colours, paint multiple layers, polish and so on.
• Car wash would also be a special location, where you can wash yours or others cars too for a smaller fee.
• Tire shop: this would be the place for buying and get new tires only. A specially designed place for trimming and replacing tires.
• Race management: as the idea was introduced in the MP mode, you could organise events for each race locations. However, our plan is even more, and not only be able to rent a track, but build and own one. We already designed the game to be able to do so, however we have tons of idea which needs to be settle down before we can start to introduce this feature.

VIRTUAL REALITY

Creative pudding is an expert of Virtual Reality, and we did helped many other companies to make their VR product a success. This time it’s our own game which will use VR to make the game even more interesting. While we already had VR mode working years ago, we want to release this feature when the car interiors and controllers are all ready to be used within VR. We are also realised that the hype around VR will make big difference in terms of devices and quality within 1-2 years, which also made us to delay this feature. Two years ago there were hardly any good solution for controlling this type of game in VR, however today there are many devices which allows us to create full immersive experience not only with driving but also with mechanical works. That is another reason why we did focus on other more important features instead of VR.

NOTE!

The listed plans are ideas and while each of them was part of the original game design we made years ago, we are keeping the rights to alter from it. So the list is a way of introducing our ideas and let You, the player, to think about it, let you give us your feedback about what would you like to see the most, which feature is the most valuable for You. We, the developers of Revhead will keep the rights and options to alter from this list, if we find that more suitable or better in any reason. Think about this roadmap as a wish-list from us, where you has the chance to support us to make it real. The better support we get, the more features we can deliver.