First of all, I want to say thank you, again, to everyone who's supported the game since launch. May 21st was the third anniversary of Slipstream, and I'm really happy to have all of you here. I hope you enjoy the news.
It took me a lot longer than expected, as expected, but the 1.2 version is now playable. It's not complete (more on that later), but it's good enogh to advance to the next phase of testing, and you're all invited to try. It is currently in an optional beta branch, and only windows builds are available, but I'll eventually add builds for other platforms. (Also, let me know if you can run it with Proton, it didn't work on my computer but maybe it will for some of you.)
So... what's new? First, let's get the negatives out of the way:
- Only 3 game modes are available: Grand Tour, Cannonball and Single Race.
- No achievements, the secret tracks are unlocked by default but the whole progression system is disabled for now. Also no leaderboards.
- No post-race information screens, game goes straight from gameplay back to the main menu when the race ends.
- No tutorial.
- Some of the settings, like difficulty and traffic density in cannonball mode, have no effect.
- The game is completely unbalanced in terms of difficulty, some races are too easy, some are impossible. I will try to fix this soon.
- In general, remember, this is BETA software, it's not finished. There are bugs, some things don't work yet, some parts of the audio and UI are missing, don't judge it based on polish right now. I guarantee it will have at least the same level of polish as the original.
Now, the fun part:
- New mechanic: Time rewind. Hold SPACE (Y on gamepad) to rewind up to 5 seconds. There is currently no limit to this mechanic, other than the rewind time resetting after use, and this will probably be changed eventually. Also expect bugs, since this is a new mechanic, and a complex one from the programming side.
- New AI. The AI cars have been completely changed in all their behavior. They are now almost exactly equivalent to a player car, having access to the same mechanics, like the slipstream, and crashing/spinning like players. Also, all of the rubberbanding has been removed, the AI cars are exactly equal to the ones available for the players. The AI is still not 100% finished, so it will do some funny stuff now and then. The collision system has also been greatly improved and the physics of the game feel better now, at least in my opinion.
- New art for all the rivals, thanks to my talented friend Victor Leão, and new dialogue for most of them. I took the liberty of writing new lines for the kickstarter backer characters. If you are a backer and want to change something on your character, email me.
- Modding. The skeleton of the modding system is already implemented, but there is no documentation and no tools yet. If you want to poke around, take a look inside the assets/content/ folder. I will elaborate on this in the future, like making tools available and adding steamworks support.
- Some technical changes. You now Alt+Enter to switch fullscreen on/off, the camera tilts, and the settings menu was changed in some ways (no more 'apply graphics settings').
I don't expect it to take much longer for the final release, but I wanted to do a beta period first so I can take your suggestions and gather more data to help me balance the game. I hope you enjoy the new version. Thanks for your patience and see you soon!