Can’t wait to hit the slopes? Well the first Tray Racers! Playtest is next weekend with a special event on Sunday 23rd when you’ll have the chance to play with the dev team. To get all the details, join the Discord: https://discord.gg/R8zTnwaKSA. 🌞
From Friday night onwards you can play the game on your own or with friends, everything from the tutorial to full blown races! The game is still in development so everything is subject to change and your feedback is greatly appreciated.
The team will also be streaming Sunday’s event on Youtube so that anyone who can’t play can watch along and ask questions about the game.
WE CAN’T WAIT TO PLAY WITH YOU ALL!
For more updates you can wishlist the game and follow us on Twitter and TikTok! 👇
Hanging out with friends at your favourite spot is hard to beat! Considering how much time we spent in game during meetings and chats it wasn’t long before we added the camp to the game. Initially a small cosy lobby screen where you could see everyone’s racers, it slowly grew into the space it is now. You can run around, chill out by the campfire, see your race times and jam with musical instruments.
We have always focused on playfulness in our games and during all our tests the camp has been a lot of fun to mess around in - stacking into giant human towers, playing hide and seek and finding other unintentional ways of playing together with friends. When you return to the camp after a race it will either be day or night which we find helps keep it fresh and it’s always a nice surprise which time you’ll get.
We can’t talk about the camp without mentioning Scrump the adorable sleepy lizard dog. Scrump really is a racer’s best friend and was one of the first additions to the camp when it first became a space to run around in. Just don’t try putting your hand in Scrump’s mouth during one of those big yawns! 💥
It was mentioned briefly during last month’s dev blog but customising your style is a big part of the camp too. There is a changing room you can visit to try on new outfits and we currently have over 100 different style and colour options to choose from for the human character alone. Shorts gang for life!
For more updates you can wishlist the game and follow us on Twitter and TikTok! 👇
Tray Racers! is coming in 2023 and you will be able to play for free with an optional supporter’s pack that unlocks bonus style options. You might be wondering why we are making it free? Does free really mean free? Don’t worry we haven’t signed a deal with the business devil! 👿💼
Tray Racers! is free because we want it to be easy for groups of friends to pick up the game and have a fun time. We started development during the first lockdown while playing a lot of other online games together. We always found it easier to get a group together if a game was free and quick to jump into.
So what is the supporter’s pack? We don’t want lots of microtransactions and ads, it will be a single purchase that helps support the game and unlocks some extra customisation options for your character in Tray Racers! There will be lots of style options available for free and we want to help players find a style that represents them without paying. ✨
There are a bunch of other things we picked up on while playing online games with our friends that we have tried to incorporate into Tray Racers! There is a quick How to Play screen as well as a more in depth tutorial so that you can get up to speed easily before your first race. Joining races is easy with a short room code you can share.
Also we noticed in online multiplayer games we spent a lot of time not actually ‘playing’ the main game, just hanging out in the lobby or waiting for someone to join. So we poured a lot of love into the camp that you hang out in between tray races. You can jump around, change your style and jam on your instrument. If you wanted you could ignore the races and just party in the camp! 🎶
In summary, we want it to be easy for you to play with friends! So when it comes out in 2023, Tray Racers! will be free alongside a paid supporter’s pack that unlocks bonus style options. No microtransactions or ads either. For more updates you can wishlist the game and follow us on Twitter and TikTok! 👇
We are Bit Loom, a 3 person Scottish indie dev team, and last month we announced our next game Tray Racers! It’s an online multiplayer party racing game where you play as ragtag kids zooming down randomly generated dune slopes… but what does that tongue-twister really mean and how did we get here from our last game about stretchy double-ended dogs!?
Well towards the end of making PHOGS we were starting to think about what our next project would be. The three of us were slowly trickling out little concepts here and there trying to find that exciting spark when someone in the team (the culprit’s identity is lost to time) said something like “nah, forget Ray Tracing, we’re all about Tray Racing!” and it really stuck.
Resident pun-maker Henry was very keen on this idea and whipped up a quick prototype, we were all surprised to find that we might actually be on to a cool idea if we could figure out how to present it. We started thinking about the types of games we were playing together at the time - 2020 was all about online games and we felt like we could create something small that would be fun and quick for people to jump into.
We had so much fun trying to beat each other's times in that tiny first prototype that we couldn’t help but excitedly start developing it further. We took some time just messing around with the racers, getting the controls and speed feeling fun, fast and intuitive while at the same time playing with the environments and terrain, finding out things like how long felt right for a race and how fast was too fast.
Tray Racers quickly became a space where we could experiment with the format of a party racing game. To make each race as surprising and exciting as possible we iterated on a system to randomly generate tracks. However, this combined with the perpetually downhill nature of racing on a tray meant that the usual format of a racing game (do a number of laps of the same circuit) wouldn’t really work. We settled tracks being long winding slopes passing through multiple biomes, with the race itself being split into a “practice” where you have some time to learn the track and find your best route and then the “final race” where everyone comes together to make it count for one final run.
Creating the crazy world of PHOGS! was an extremely fun experience and we knew we wanted to make the setting of our next game just as vibrant and bizarre. Something about racing down giant sand dunes conjured the image of an apocalyptic world where the current ways of life were gone but there was still a lot of fun to be had in the playground left behind. As such we settled on the concept of a bunch of ragtag kids having fun in a fantastical desert wasteland, one with all the dangers and hardships replaced with the kinds of exciting and crazy things kids might dream up existing in such a world. And of course it wouldn’t be a Bit Loom game if the main mode of transport isn’t being eaten by giant worms…
We have been working hard on every part of the game and are very excited for people to get their hands on the game next year for free on PC and Nintendo Switch. For more updates you can wishlist the game and follow us on Twitter and TikTok! 👇
