Hey everyone, it’s us, Bojan and the crew behind Barely Racing. I know it’s been a long while since I last posted here. You know how it is. Life and “current world events” happen. It seems that over the last few years, each of around 8 billion people in the world had something compromised.
Luckily, Barely Racing has been doing well and I have some news to share.
We’ve done a fair bit regarding the development in about 2 years since we last posted. The game’s near its completion as of now and we can announce a couple of things.
- Firstly, we aim to have Barely Racing released well before the end of the year, hopefully sometime in Q3 2023.
- Secondly, Barely Racing will be ported to Switch and possibly to other platforms in the future. We all feel that it’s a great move, as the game seems to be a good fit for these platforms.
It’s hard to beat the feeling of having split-screen races with your friends on a console, right? And it’s still the easiest and simplest to connect 4 controllers to a console. However, the game will be virtually the same on all of the platforms, so it won’t matter where and how you play it, as it will deliver a steady 60 FPS despite the platform.
Unfortunately, we decided to abandon the Linux and Mac versions of the game. We don’t expect the amount of work needed to be worth the effort. Making a port and leaving it be would be a challenge, however, possible fixes and updates make it way too complex.
So, aside from porting, polishing and focusing on the business part of the whole endeavour, what have we done since the last community post here? We’ll share more details about that in the next devlog we’d like to post soon, but to keep it short, here’s a list:
- All tracks were redesigned to ensure driving and racing on them was always as fun as it gets).
- We added three visual themes to the tracks (Junkyard - a dystopian and desert-like environment, District - your regular, nicely kept and neat neighbourhood and Jungle - muddy slopes and dense greenery).
- The story mode was added (we’re no Shakespeares, but it’s still something!),
- Cups were added.
- Characters got redesigned.
- The menu and some parts of the UI got rebuilt from the ground up.
- And last, but not least - there are now rockets in the game.
As you can see, there was quite a lot of work we did. We’ll tell you more about it soon, but let us state one thing now:
It’s easy to make an ok game and roll with it. Barely Racing was a title like that. However, we decided that we don’t want many compromises in a game that’s about high octanes and explosions. It wouldn’t feel appropriate. Because of this, we scrapped big parts of the game and made it better. Sure, it took time and it’s a pity we didn’t let you know about it earlier (sorry about that), but we felt it was an obligatory step and that Barely Racing is exponentially better as a result of such drastic measures.
And yeah, adding rockets was necessary as well. No doubts here.
While there’s some work to be done, it’s nice to finally see the finish line after all these years. The project’s been in the works since 2018, so it took a while, but we are sure it was worth it.
The current build of the game’s playable - give it a shot and let us know what you think about it. Talk to you sometime soon, we reckon. The next post will be more technical in its nature.
And there’s also one last thing.
Sign up for the beta test here - https://www.fragile-software.com/apply-for-beta