Hi Folks, Exclusive news for any of you hard reading touch arcade forumites. Our next game is well into production, and is called Nano Rally. The game is based around miniturised rally cars, time trialing around everything from apples to screwdrivers to sandwichs to fish ponds. The complete feature list is yet to be finalised, but expect 20+ tracks, 5+ different environments, plus online leaderboards etc. The following designs are not 100% finished, but they should give you an idea of what the game is going to look and feel like. hope you like them, cheers Morgan
Yeah.. I think tilt control would be better for this game. The graphics look really polished by the way
Looks very polished, can't wait to see a gameplay video. Are there other cars on the track or are you just racing the clock?
No plans for landscape, as the best control of the car requires lots of room to see whats coming - the images dont really show it, but it plays pretty fast. Tilt controls are a possibilty, we will give it a go and see if it plays well. morgan
Personally, I think you should consider this configuration. The right thumb would be placed behind the player's car and would control breaking/acceleration. The left thumb would control turning and would be in the path of the car, so that's not good, but I think the controls would feel more natural. In that case, the car would be moving from side to side, not top to bottom. Edit: Accel should be on the bottom since that's pressed more often and wont put the thumb in front of too much as often. Edit: Another option might be to have turning buttons on the same side as the car. Instead of having accel/break, just use auto-accel and break to slow down (like RealRacing). This way the thumb will always be behind the car unless the player need to break. Edit: If you had auto-accel with tilt controls, the only on-screen buttons would be break, which could be anywhere the player taps on the screen.
Thanks for the input, its an iteresting idea. Ive just done a quit test by tilting the phone, as the game is top down that has a similar effect - and the buttons are in ok locations. However, it turns out to be seriously hard to control at speed! This i possibly because the natural direction for the brain to look for obsticles is directly ahead. That said, it does give the game an interesting sideways shooter feel - though slightly odd! Morgan
Personally I think the portrait mode is the right choice. having all the controls near each other is exactly what you need when the game speeds up. In that landscape mode the arrows are too far apart and would cause crashes simply because the user has so much space between inputs
It take the rally name literally - so it just one car at a time - but your times will be up against those of other drivers of varing quality. there will be a championship mode, where points are gained for top 8 placings for each race - most points wins, with best cumulative time tie breaker.
Online play and peer-to-peer are certainly a possibility, however not for launch. They will come in updates, peer-to-peer probably pretty quickly - then online as soon as we can.
See. I would have it that you go up against ghost cars of past times. If you could track the route someone takes in the course of a stage then give an Upload option afterwards, it would add a bit less of a solitary feel. You wouldn't crash into anyone, you could still take the exact route you want, but it would bring the feeling of there being other players more.
There certainly is sweet drift physics, in fact you can customize the car's acceleration/top speed/brakes/handling to suite the track. So there will be plenty of opportunities for power slides round corners... well around apples.
When I first glanced at the screen shots I thought "wow, a racing game using the Bubblehead engine". Then I realized it was the wrong developer. Oops! Either way it looks pretty cool. This will definitely be one to watch for.
