This is a big one. The latest update brings the opportunity for players to customise their vessels for their own playing style, visually tweaking them out at the same time.
In Race mode, Time Gate, and Survival, you will see new options for customising your vessel. You can swap out three components - the body, the wheel, and the core. And whilst your vessel's handling won't be affected, you can change the colour too.
The three component types each affect the handling of the vessel, adding and subtracting from five stats in total:
Steering How quickly your vessel turns
Air Handling Vessels with good air handling have less of a turning speed penalty when airborne.
Boost Capacity Higher capacity means more boost time.
Boost Speed Affects the top speed of your boost
Recharge Rate Each time you roll through a gate, your boost meter is recharged. A higher recharge rate means more of your meter is filled each time.
With this update, there are two vessel bodies, two wheels and three cores available for a total of 12 different combinations. As we add more components to the database, the number of combinations will grow, bringing visual variety and a greater number of builds into play.
Excited about this one. Share your thoughts below or on the discussion boards and let me know what you go for: boost capacity or recharge rate? Maybe you prefer good air handling over boosting? How is it working out in multiplayer?
Heads up! v0.4.0 is due to be another transformative update, with another big component for the game dropping neatly into place. This new update will introduce vessel customisation to the game.
Going forwards, you will be able to swap out the three main components of your vessel - the body, the wheel, and the core. You can further customise your vessel by choosing the key colour, as you have been able to up to now. This customisation will be more than visual. Each component that you choose will affect a number of stats affecting your vessel's handling, enabling you to create a custom build for your play style. However, there will be tradeoffs involved. Need more air time? Sure, but you'll probably have to trade off some cornering ability. Need more boost capacity? Okay, but you're probably going to reduce your air time. You get the idea.
So when is this splendid stuff coming to the game? This is a bigger update than usual, so it won't be tomorrow, which would be the usual two weeks since the last update. Instead I'm aiming for mid next week, with a couple more days to polish things up to the level you would expect.
In the meantime, here's some early screenshots of some customised vessels. Enjoy!
Hey, why no Steam Sale?
So as you might have gathered if you were waiting for it, SUPER IMPOSSIBLE ROAD isn't in Steam's Summer Picnic Sale. I thought I'd better let you know what my thinking is on that.
First off, I do love a good Steam sale. I've bought plenty of games on them myself and saved lots of money doing so. I bought Deadly Premonition this morning for a couple of dollars, knowing full well I might either hate it or fall completely for its janky B movie sub-Twin Peaks charms. What I'm trying to make clear is, my reason for not putting SIR on sale certainly isn't a hatred of sales.
Fig. 1 - GODDAMMIT
Behind my reasoning is a belief in what Early Access is, or what it can be if it's done right. Developing a game alongside your players is an amazing thing. You can gauge opinion on specific features and change plans accordingly. You can fix bugs you might never have found before the game comes out. You can watch people play your game on YouTube and Twitch and hear their immediate unfiltered response. And you can shape your game into something you know people will love.
But most importantly, you can start to build a community around your game. The people who buy and play your games before it launches are savvy and knowledgeable, and are more likely to share their experiences with others. If we're going to get all businessy about it, this makes them your most valuable customers. Best treat them right.
One of the most important ways I can treat early adopters well is to be fair about pricing. SIR launched at $9.99, with a further 10% launch discount to reward those of you who have been waiting patiently for the game. I think it's only right that this is the lowest price the game can be bought at before the launch. If I put the game on a 33% reduction during the Steam sale, what message does that send to my customers? The message is that they made the wrong decision. Not a message I'm willing to send to my MVPs.
So what happens to SIR's price from here on? Well, there will be no sales during Early Access. When large development pieces like multiplayer and career mode are finished, the price will increase slightly to reflect the game you're getting. Eventually, the game will get a full release, and at this point, the price will increase to the full release price. In this way, the Early Access price *is* the sale, and SIR will have been on sale for months before release, for anyone who is interested enough to buy it. I think this is the best way to do it, and I hope you agree. Feel free to let me know in the comments if you don't.
Anyway, thanks for listening. Early Access doesn't just mean early access for players to the game, but also early access for developers to their audience. I feel privileged to get that access, so thank you all. Happy sale hunting!
v0.3.0, the Time Gate update, is live
Time Gate has been overhauled. The game mode looks better, plays better, and the rules are obvious without tutorials. Go through the new time gate and the road will build in front of you. Overshooting the gate means there's nothing for you to land on, making the mode less confusing.
As previously noted, the leaderboards for Time Gate have been reset because of the gameplay changes, so now's your chance to get a good position!
Sometime tomorrow (Friday 17th June 2016) I'll be wiping both of the Time Gate leaderboards (Keres and Athos). This will be necessary for the latest update which will bring massive improvements to Time Gate, and will be a major visual upgrade. Here's an in game engine screenshot of how it will look on Keres:
Stay tuned for more details on the update when it goes out tomorrow!
Kevin
v0.2.0 is live
Welcome! The big focus for this build was performance. Procedural generation of tracks has been rewritten, which leads to load times up to 10x faster. This also fixes micro pauses on slower machines on the endless modes (Survival and Time Gate), because the track is constantly being generated.
Changes:
Procedural generation of tracks is much faster
Added a new launch option so you can launch the PC version without seeing the config screen, handy for Big Picture mode.
Bug fixes:
Gate marker numbers on Keres are not being shown
SFX and music volume don't change according to settings
Pause menu has no SFX
As usual, please do report any bugs on the discussion boards, although make sure you've checked the Open Bugs list on the Trello board.
Cheers,
Kevin
When is version 0.2.0 coming?
Hi all,
Just a quick note to let you know when to expect version 0.2.0.
This version has some major structural changes to the track generation code which will result in a huge reduction for load times, as well as removing micropauses during Time Gate and Survival Mode which occurred when new track is being generated on the fly on slower machines.
Early results are very impressive, and you should notice a huge difference, especially for loading times on longer race tracks.
Version 0.2.0 will be released next Friday 3rd of June. In the meantime, check out the Trello board for SIR which I've just made public to see what's going on with SIR's development in more detail. I've pinned the link here.
Kind Regards,
Kevin
Version 0.1.7 is live
Hi all!
Thanks again for taking a leap of faith and getting in on the Early Access for SUPER IMPOSSIBLE ROAD. Without further fanfare, here's the first update. It's a small one to fix up some of the issues you've been good enough to flag in the discussion board.
Here's the changelog:
- If you press back (or Escape on the keyboard) from the main menu, you get a dialog screen which lets you exit the game completely. Now you can play the game in Steam's Big Picture Mode without touching your keyboard!
- Fixed: Sometimes when you paused the game the audio dropped out completely.
- Fixed: The first controller and the keyboard were mapped to the same player. This meant you couldn't play a 2 player game with just a keyboard and one controller - you needed 2 controllers.
- Fixed: You could only play Time Gate and Survival using the first controller or the keyboard.
First update complete. Good work everyone, thanks again!
Kevin
Launch Day!
It's here at last! To reward all you early adopters and wishlisters, there's an additional 15% discount on the game for the first week of sale.
Hope you enjoy all the hard work. There's a lot more to come too. Stick around and contribute to the discussion board as we build out the multiplayer, vehicle customisation and single player career modes. There's more music to come, track types and polish too. With your feedback, we can make this game the best it can possibly be.
Here's a couple of new trailers for the launch. First, a 15 second teaser trailer, great for sharing on Twitter and the like:
Here's some in-game footage to keep you all going! This was captured from a gaming laptop (Asus ROG GL552JW) at GDC by the good people at Polygon, and is unchanged apart from a few cuts to keep the length down.
