Plan for Brett Fattori

I sat down recently to work on Racer and was doing some stuff on the Track Editor, when I decided to get nostalgic and see where we are compared to where we came from. The idea for the track, itself, materialized back in December of '03 when I was working on the stencil shadows resource.

By mid January, I had a solid plan but didn't know what it would take to implement it, and was still pretty involved in the shadows code. It got shelved until February when I had some moments to lay out some code. The results were something to behold! A ribbon of racetrack winding through the orc village. I quickly became tired of trying to finish the shadow code, created a resource, and moved onto getting collision working for the track.

Matt Fairfax had worked out a resource to do collisions on a new object within the engine, and Melv May had a resource for getting a new object into the engine that Matt's code used. Both were very useful in helping me to get the first bits of collision working. This began to attract some attention (as I like to pimp what I'm working on) from Joe Maruschak who had, apparently, been wanting to do a racing game. I was all to pleased to show him the latest developments.

Joe, and his partner at Bravetree, Clark Fagot proposed the idea of working together to develop a racing game. After a little time aquainting myself with their way of doing things, the idea quickly evolved into a proof of concept for more than just the track. Clark had spent a lot of time working on (what is now known as) the component system. That, combined with the track, and the creative talents of Joe, began to metamorphasise into a more convincing prototype.

Anyways, it's interesting to see where things have come from and are going to. We've added a track editor and have lately been hashing out next steps now that the foundation is solidifying. Soon we'll be able to show an actual game, with real gameplay. This will probably be my last .plan for a while as I hunker down to work on the game. But I wanted to leave you with something that hopefully makes you go "wow".

The following video shows how simple we're trying to make things for our end-users. You're going to see how easy it is to build a track, and then race on that track. It only shows a small, small part of what will be available. It's still so early in development that we don't have all of what will be in there spec'd out yet. But hopefully it gives you a taste of what is to come from us. One last note on the next video... The total process took 2 minutes. One minute to create the track (moving the camera around took the longest time) and one minute to make two "takes" of racing that same track.

It's fun to show off a little...

- Brett