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[Shiroboi]

Hi everyone, It's a new year so I thought I'd start a new post.

If you don't know what I'm talking about with the new Initial D inspired fangame, Drift Rebels, please check out the old post.
Drift Rebels Original Post

So I have a few big updates to make as of February 12th, 205

1. We lost some of our prototypes that we were making. I was intending on tweaking it and making a video but I don't want to sink more development time into the prototype. We've got our new racing system which will take significant time to integrate and build up on.

2. We're building a new Senior Level Unity team in March to dig into the hardcore game development that takes so long. Hopefully a Grand Turismo style racer will be on the agenda. Once we achieve that, it will be the platform for Drift Rebels

3. This is the bad news of the group I suppose. I launched a Wangan style Tokyo Highway Racer game. It was an absolute flop which seriously concerns me that there aren't enough people interested in Japanese Based Racing games. I think there is plenty enough market for a Drift Racing game but I can't afford to have Drift Rebels flop that bad. We're still going to move forward and make the game, with a story element but I think we're going to make the game a bit more international friendly with US/German cars and a less Japanese focused storyline. For every 1 guy who's into Japanese culture, there's 99 rednecks that want to see a Camaro do a sweet burnout.

If you want to try the game out, it's for iOS only right now, Android coming on the 20th, you can get it here. Admittedly there's a pretty nasty performance bug but it smooths out as you play. Tokyo Highway Racer iOS

4. Physics. Unlike some games like Ridge Racer, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Burnout, and other arcade racers, we're going with a single physics model. This is challenging both for the developer and the player but I think it will feel more authentic as a result. I've spent countless hours coming up with what I feel are the right physics settings. The focus here though isn't seeing how long and pretty you can make the drift like some drifting games seem to be about. It's a racing game and the drifting needs to be fast. Going sideways looks nice but it isn't the fastest way to move forward. Currently the car handles well at high speeds, can initiate short drifts in the corners, giving it gas accelerates the drift and braking stabilizes the car. The car is able to recover from the drift and keep going. I tested out countless configurations and the one I'm using felt fast and fun and I was able to keep going for a long time at high speeds without crashing. You know how you feel when everything else melts away and you're in the zone driving perfectly? I think I was able to get there. I'm not saying that things can't be tweaked but I think I found a good base to start. My big concern though is that these settings are rather delicate, changing things like tires will have a massive effect on whether the car drifts or not. Speed is no problem though so we can have incremental upgrades.

5. Ah, the fun part. Cars. I recently bought almost all the high quality mobile cars I could get my hands on. Here's the complete list.



Japanese Drift Cars
Nissan 370Z
Nissan GTR
Nissan Silvia S13R
Toyota GT86 / Scion FRS
Toyota Supra RZ
Subaru WRX STi 2008
Toyota Celica GT4 Castrol Rally Car
Acura NSX
Nissan R-34 GTR
Toyota Trueno AE-86
Mazda RX-7 FD

Other Cars that I Own
Audi R8 V10
BMW M3 E92
Bugatti Veyron Super Sport
Chevrolet Camaro ZLR
Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
Ferrari 458
Koenigsegg Agera
Lamborghini Reventon
Maserati Granturismo
McLaren MP4 12C
Mercedes Benz SLS
SRT Viper GTS
Shelby GT500
VW Golf Mk. VI Gti

Acura ARX LeMans Prototype
BMW Z4 Cabriolet
Chevrolet Camaro Pro Touring
Chevrolet Corvette Stingray
Dodge Charger 1969
Dodge Ram SRT10
Lamborghini Gallardo
Shelby GT500 KR Pro Touring

[RIT_ninja]

Happy New Year, looking forward to the upcoming game.

As of your third point, you may want to look into E-marketing for your game. Tokyo highway racing games may be a niche now but you can still develop for a niche crowd without flopping. Can't tell you how to run a business, but you need to iron out the bugs in your game, get great reviews on the app store.

I tried out the Tokyo Highway game, and I don't want to bash on it too much, but it is a lukewarm product. Simply because the gameplay mechanism of dodging cars and collecting coins have been way over used. If your game gets stacked up against Asphalt Outrun, there would be no way you can win over them due to budget and time.

Drift Rebels however, I see good potentials because aside from Asphalt, I haven't seen much street racing or point to point racing. If you can create a game with collection of cars not common in other games, courses unique to your own, great music, good physics, and smooth frame rate, then I think the game would boom with users

Just my $0.02

[Falbere]

Having european/american cars aside is good. But I would personally vote against having supercars in this game, like the Lamborghinis for example. Instead, I wish there is more focus on real cars used in street racing, like the Golf, and Ford Focus etc. Having muscle cars are good too.

I also suggest customization features, like changing car colors, rims, bumpers, side skirts, headlamps, and spoilers.

@RIT_ninja the upcoming Need For Speed No Limits would be heading in that direction.


This post has been edited by Falbere on Feb 13 2015, 08:37 PM

[Shiroboi]

Hey guys, I totally forgot I had made this post, I've been busy.

As for Tokyo Highway Racer, it was template based unlike my parking games which are original The highway racer game didn't use my physics engine so I coudln't tweak it much. I realize how much competition is for traffic racer games and I think I'm going to not do them anymore. I'll stick to what I'm good at, tweaking physics and making actual racing games.

Right now, we're currently working on a city based Drift Parking game based on our new Parking Engine 2. It'll be drifting in the city and time based. I'd look for that to be available in Late March hopefully. This will feature lots of different cars and should be at least 12 tracks. It will use the same physics engine as drift rebels with pretty much the same settings so I think it'll be a good indication of what Drift Rebels will be like.

The other good news is that we realized how much time that development is taking and want to be able to produce bigger, more polished pgames. We just hired a senior unity developer to work full time and spend the next 1-2 months building a larger, gran turismo style game with racing and AI, multiple cars, tracks and upgrades. I will use that platform to build drift rebels. So it's well on track to becoming a reality.


Falbere, to answer your question. I agree with you, I'll probably have RWD classics like an M3 in there. We'll have up to A class cars but no S class or racing class cars as that kind of ruins the simple fun of drifting in a local setting. These cars need to be affordable by younger people. You don't see 17 year olds with ferraris so I think we can leave out the super cars.


RIT_Ninja, once we start development of the actual drift rebels game and have complelling gamplay to show, i'll hopefully launch a kickstarter campaign for the main purpose of marketing. Ideally, I'd like to get enough money to buy Unity Pro licenses so we can start adding really excellent lighting (it's mostly a nightime racing game) and post processing effects like motion blur.

P.S. One of the reasons that we didn't start with a game like Drift Rebels is because we know how green we are at 3D game development. With every major game we release, we're dramatically increasing the quality and scope of our games. My big goal is to really push the graphic technology on Mobile to produce stunning visuals and hopefully we improve our gameplay and level design at the same time. It's a process but we're making excellent progress so far. here's stills from our new off-road truck parking 2 game so you can see what we're talking about.

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