Set to be released this Summer, Flippfly has announced that Race the Sun is coming to the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita. As a bonus, the game will support both Cross Buy and Cross Saves across all three systems.
To see what Race the Sun is all about, check out this gameplay trailer:
After saying how Race the Sun “had to be fast, fun, and challenging,” Flippfly Co-Founder Forest San Filippo revealed how the game’s easy to learn:
The first major problem to tackle was control. When it comes down to it, controls of any racer (no matter how complex) usually revolve around making your vehicle turn left and right. We decided that we wanted the turning mechanism to be super simple, and that turned out to be easier said than done.
When simulating the physics of a real object moving in 3D space, there are tons of things to consider. Acceleration, inertia, and drag need to be calculated, and the control algorithms need to act in harmony with those forces. Every little change to one of the variables makes the controls feel totally different.
So you test, you play, you try a different number, you test again, you try a different algorithm, and so on and so forth. The process was time consuming, but ultimately worth it. We didn’t stop tweaking until we felt we had struck the best possible balance: not too tight, not too loose.
While Race the Sun is easy to learn, it’s also hard to master:
After a few months of work, we had a vehicle that felt great to control at crazy speeds, and a really basic world to race through. Aaron (our programmer) had created a procedural system to make the world go on forever, and we had decided on solar power as the source of energy and speed. The heart of the game was there, but once you got good at it there wasn’t much challenge.
We knew what needed to happen. We needed to hand-design more varied and interesting obstacles in the world, but — being a small team — we didn’t know how we were going to pull it off in any reasonable amount of time.
This is when Aaron came up with an idea for generating the world out of a combination of hand-designed and procedural elements. The end result was that we were able to make complex combinations of obstacles in short order. This also meant that we could make the world rearrange itself each day — so you could never quite predict what would be coming.
Did Race the Sun just become a game you’ll be buying this year? Let us know in the comments below.
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