Development Update February 2025

February Was Too Short

We had to say goodbye to Marls. They've been with us for quite some time now. They did great work here and on the social platforms. Hopefully we will have more budget in the future to bring them back. As you may have noticed, a group of people were banned from the server last month. They were all different people with different backgrounds and history with Xform and Burnin' Rubber. What they had in common though is their disruptive behavior and negative energy. It's always sad because they were longtime fans and community members. It's definitely been more quiet and friendlier the last month. But there are no winners in this story. We wish them all the best and who knows they might make a return in the future. On to the positive! We're making good progress in the work on the 'tracks demo' milestone! See below!. We had a new art intern join us and we're very happy with his efforts so far. He brings new energy and inspiration to the project. Some of our old friends are helping by working on the boss models! Which are already looking insanely awesome! Sorry to say that it might still take a while before we're showing them.

Cheers, Diederik

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UI Reworked how the the 'Play Cup' screen looks. We've also added some more visual effects to the Ticket Office (space) scene, which is looking pretty interesting already! We also reworked the 'Total Results' for the cup game mode.

3D Art Bosses, props and a trophy for winning the cup were on the menu this month. All shaping up pretty well! Tracks There's still plenty of work on the tracks to be done. Adding props, but also doing fixes to the invisible wall. And maybe doing some fixes to avoid unwanted barrel rolls :).

Camera Some of you may have seen the camera improvements (I also posted some news on that here ⁠

Camera Movement looks a bit won…). We added some grid and player cinematics which look great. At the moment we're trying out some controller rumble, which is pretty neat too. ###

FAQ UPDATE

1) How is the engagement going on social platforms? Not great. It costs a lot of effort and the views, followers and subscribers numbers are not growing in a steady way. It's very discouraging. We will probably focus our energy on a specific moment (i.e. the release of this demo we're working on). If someone has concrete ideas and tricks, don't hesitate to post them.

2) Will the game have raytracing or other awesome graphical tricks? No ray tracing implementation is planned at the moment. But you can never rule it out if implementation becomes (a lot) easier. We're thinking of migrating to Unity 6 in the future, which might provide better motion blurs and temporal AA. We might even move from Forward rendering to Forward+ (enabling a lot more lights to be processed). Also, we'd love to support DLSS and FSR in some way. It would only make sense if it does not break the game in a million ways.

3) Will there be online multiplayer? No. It's too hard and unstable for us to get right. We'd need a much bigger budget and bigger team. The best we can do now (not even started on it though) is local split screen. Which maybe can be made working for the Steam remote play. That would be awesome!