Throttle Trace has a demo, and it's available now! Here are the features you'll find:
Career Mode: Begin your rookie season in Vroomula 1, and participate in a shortened 3-race season. Can you prove your racing mettle and secure a contract for next year?
Time Attack: Find the limit and claim your spot on the leaderboards across 3 Tracks
Database Editor: Want to race with a grid of 60 cars? Or build a roster of drivers from your favorite racing series? Or give yourself a rocket ship for an engine? Go for it!
Multiplayer Lobbies: Setup custom races with friends, or pop into the Discord to find new friends to race with
The ol' over-under
Throughout May, I've been hard at work building P2P multiplayer support.
Custom lobbies are available in the demo for players to try. What I'm even more excited to build in the coming months is co-op career mode! This will be the perfect way to work together with your dearest friends and bring eternal glory to your team. Or sabotage them at every opportunity to claim your spot with a front-running team while they languish in the back. The choice will be yours!
I will be looking for player feedback about adding ranked multiplayer in the future as well. This requires greater technical investment (dedicated servers for stats, ranking, matchmaking, client and server-side cheat detection, etc), and will only be considered if there's significant interest from players.
Of course, Throttle Trace will always prioritize an amazing fully-offline experience first.
I'm glad you asked!
Full Controller Support
Throttle Trace is now fully navigable with a controller. This required building a new panel-based navigation system, adding controller-specific icons, and more.
This is an important step towards getting the game Steam Deck Verified.
Updated Visuals
Dynamic camera zoom based on player speed
New HUD design, including updates that better support huge grids of cars (in case you want to try running 30-team series using the database editor)
New grass effects (shoutout to this tutorial)
New original theme from TAALL Sounds
The artist I previously collaborated with on Vroomies has finished a new track for Throttle Trace. I've been obsessed with it. Check out their work here!
Updates to Contract Negotiations
Teams will now extend offers to drivers throughout the season. Players and AI drivers can consider these offers and only sign once they are confident its the best one. Don't wait too long though, teams may withdraw offers if the driver's performances suffer or if they crash into one of the team's cars.
Quality of Life improvements
Your race engineer will now warn you about tire wear
Players are forced to pit when starting the final lap of a race in which they haven't yet changed tires (if tire wear is enabled)
The racing line will preview into the pit lane if the player has indicated they a pitting this lap
and way more
Want to help shape the future of Throttle Trace? I've set up a shiny new discord server to chat about the game, setup multiplayer races, and give feedback on the demo. Come say hi!