For this time we’ll have one Dev Diary covering two months at once, sorry for the long delay! This will actually be a shorter diary as we’re overwhelmed with work on DTC, but we have an important news to share: the release month!
Release month and store page
Let’s just skip the unimportant parts and go straight to the juice. While I don’t have an exact day yet for the release, I’m pretty confident over June 2024! Actually aiming for the first half of it, before the start of Summer, but let’s see how things will go. My previous idea was for end of April 2024, but I’ve had some setbacks along the way.
I’ve recently completed the submission process to have the Meta store page up and running, and I’m waiting for the review results. Crossing fingers for it to take just a bunch of days, so the game can be wishlisted by you players, and it will be generally more convenient to share around.
Development progress
In the previous diary I mentioned how after the complex work on AI, there was not much left to do before the release. Turns out I wasn’t wrong, but what I didn’t expect is that the faster and snappier Sport cars highlighted some issues with the AI, requiring some more fine tuning. So I first got caught in that, but then I zapped between some extra things too: tuning the opponents difficulty level, tuning the physics and the specs of the cars, fixing various issues with engine audio, doing more performance optimisation because that kind of stuff is never over, and so on.
The game is currently in a nicely playable state and there are no real bugs or issues that I know of, just things that can be polished and improved. What’s missing now is the game loop, which comes in the form of a single player “campaign” where you will join events to win tickets, then you can use those tickets to purchase new items. Interestingly for this type of racing games, the game loop consists in mostly interface navigation and menus. After all, the real action happens on the racetrack and luckily that part is pretty much sorted out now for DTC.
Another feature missing now, but that will be available at launch, is the ability to create customised opponents and race against them. You’ll be able to create CPU drivers with custom name, behaviour, difficulty, and their preference for car, suit and paint color. Once again this is just interface work, because the AI logic is already there, so not much extra work is needed. I’m sure this feature will be greatly appreciated by players wanting to fine tune the difficulty level of races, and by those wanting to reenact races against opponents based on friends, characters or real drivers.
Wrapping up
I’d like to cut short the Dev Diary today because I’m eager to work on the final things without losing too much time here, hope you can understand. I’ll be around again hopefully in a few days, when the store page for DTC will be online. See you soon!
Danjel Ricci “SkyArcher”