Inertial Drift has been 7 years in the making(!) - and to give you an an idea of how the game evolved into the version you see today, we wanted to showcase Inertial Drift's whole development timeline!
2013-2015
The first prototype was built in 2013 and looked like this through to 2015 while exploring how to do physics/handling.
April 2016
After some contract work on another project started to wind down, development on Inertial Drift start to pick up. This is the first test track. Handling and collision are garbage, but the twin stick controls are already fun.
May 2016
The first pass on designing actual tracks. This would go on to become the first track in the game, Lakeside Loop. Handling is a lot better now.
From above the track still looks a lot like the final version, the major features are there, things were just tightened up, refined and the final section (right most on the image) was replaced.
June 2016
Our very first art pass. The same layout but with some very basic texture work, terrain, shader and model replacement, but no real artstyle in mind yet.
Late 2016
Our first pitch and experimenting in a very different direction visually. The handling of the four cars at this point is surprisingly close to their final iterations. Already some car animation work going on here, but much more of that to come.
2017
At this point we spent a bunch of time to pin down our actual aesthetic by doing concept dioramas in engine to explore the colour palettes for each track.
August 2017
Lakeside loop now redesigned and with a very rough art pass in the final style we'd end up going with. Besides the density and quality of assets the biggest thing missing here is reflections - which ended up becoming a big part of the final game's aesthetic.
July 2018
At this point, with another pass on both the cars and the tracks, Lakeside Loop is starting to look a lot more like itself.
2018 Onwards
From this point much of the work was just taking our very rough tracks from this in May 2018:
To this in March 2020:
We've come a long way, and we couldn't have imagined what the final product was going to look like from the place we started.
We hope you are all enjoying it!
- Level 91 Entertainment