Over 21 years after the original, the wait for GeneRally 2 finally nears its end: The successor to the popular top-down racer is set to hit Steam Early Access in a week on May 30th - and RaceDepartment got the opportunity to talk about the game in a bit more detail with one of its creators: James Burgess, Founder and Director of developer Curious Chicken games, gave us exclusive and exciting insight into the history and background of the project, plans for what is still to come and what to expect from the Early Access version.
Image Credit: Curious Chicken Games
At some point we stopped thinking about what we could possibly have at some point, and instead started focussing on taking steps, however small they were, to actually having those things.
Working with Markku has also been one of the things that’s kept the dream alive, so to speak. I don't think we ever really talked about not doing this, and even though we had very slow progress at times, he was always ready and willing to give the next phase a go.
And from a team perspective, it was great when people around us who had skills that we needed decided they wanted to contribute to the project, too. We built a small, but capable team – and the shared passion and excitement for the progress we were making really pushed us along.
And the response was so positive – we received so many positive comments and messages, and understandably, many of them came with a big dose of surprise, too!
When you’re already proud of what you have, and what you’ve achieved, and other people come along and say “hey, this looks great, I want it!” – that's an inspiring feeling.
experiences” - but these days it’s nice to have something you can pick up for 20 minutes in between the day-to-day life chaos, and get a dose of that racing adrenaline!
In more recent times, I’ve been getting that “fix” in our own game - but that’s nothing away from those two games.
Console Versions & VR?
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Image Credit: Curious Chicken Games
It has been over 20 years since GeneRally has been released. The development of GeneRally 2 was originally announced in 2014, but things did not go smoothly initially. What has happened and how did you pull through to get the game ready for Steam Early Access?
I think we learned a lot of lessons about how to announce a product when you’re just two guys with not a lot of experience, but a lot of enthusiasm. I'm not going to say that it was down to youth, but we’ve definitely got a lot wiser with age. We could probably have saved ourselves a lot of pain by being a bit more realistic in the early days, but we’re where we are now because of what we got wrong as well as what we got right.At some point we stopped thinking about what we could possibly have at some point, and instead started focussing on taking steps, however small they were, to actually having those things.
What inspired you and the team to keep going and develop a successor after such a long time?
On a personal level: stubbornness – and a lot of support and encouragement from my wife. Being stubborn by yourself only gets you so far, being stubborn as a team gets you a little bit further.Working with Markku has also been one of the things that’s kept the dream alive, so to speak. I don't think we ever really talked about not doing this, and even though we had very slow progress at times, he was always ready and willing to give the next phase a go.
And from a team perspective, it was great when people around us who had skills that we needed decided they wanted to contribute to the project, too. We built a small, but capable team – and the shared passion and excitement for the progress we were making really pushed us along.
How was the resonance to the Early Access announcement? It did not look like the project was on many people's radars before.
Well, we’d kept the news about what we were working on to ourselves for a reason. As I mentioned before, we wanted this to be about showing off something we already had not something we hoped to have in the future. However, we also knew that we were announcing this because it was something we wanted to do, not because it was something people expected or were waiting for.And the response was so positive – we received so many positive comments and messages, and understandably, many of them came with a big dose of surprise, too!
When you’re already proud of what you have, and what you’ve achieved, and other people come along and say “hey, this looks great, I want it!” – that's an inspiring feeling.
Top-down racing games have seen a bit of a resurgence over the last few years with titles like Circuit Superstars or Art of Rally. Have you tried any of them and if so, how did you like them?
Absolutely – on a personal level I play almost any racing game I can get my hands on. Circuit Superstars and Art of Rally are both great games – and I only wish I had more time to play them. Probably in my younger years I’d have passed over both of them, focussed as I was on “simexperiences” - but these days it’s nice to have something you can pick up for 20 minutes in between the day-to-day life chaos, and get a dose of that racing adrenaline!
In more recent times, I’ve been getting that “fix” in our own game - but that’s nothing away from those two games.
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Track Editor Improvements & CustomizabilityConsole Versions & VR?
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Track Editor Improvements & Customizability
You have been officially involved in working on GeneRally since 2010. How has working on a new game changed since then?
Well, when I started working on GeneRally, it was mostly in a maintenance capacity. There was no talk of a “GeneRally 2” – or anything even remotely like that – at the start.Hannu (Räbinä - one of the original developers) contacted me and said “I’ve got this updated version of GR, but it needs more work. You were interested in taking this and running with it, so here you go.” Essentially, what he’d done was change a bunch of GR’s core system to use more modern libraries, that worked better on modern systems – but he was maybe 50% of the way through that process when he'd decided to stop.
Our intention was really to update the game to work better on more modern platforms, add a few long-overdue features (such as integrating palette-switching), and just try to breathe a little bit of new life into the game.
Our announcement of GeneRally 2 came from that same place, too – we wanted to add more features, but the things we wanted to do, the existing codebase couldn't easily support. We talked with Hannu, and he was on-board with the idea, and we went from there.
One of the core elements that made the first GeneRally so popular was the easy-to-use Track Editor. Could you give us some more insight into how the editor will be improved for GeneRally 2?
I don't think there's an area of the Track Editor that hasn’t seen an improvement. The biggest upgrade is moving from 2D to 3D – and all the benefits that brings with it: easier object placement and easier height-map painting being the major ones. We've added a bunch of time-saving tools, such as painting masks; a line-based object placement tool; and a brush-based object placement tool. You can also test-drive your tracks directly in the Track Editor, which is a massive change from GeneRally. Anyway, we’re not planning on stopping there - we've got more quality-of-life features planned.The map size in the track editor has grown a bit throughout development and reached a maximum size of 1024x1024 pixels by December 2022. Is this the size you are planning to keep, or are even bigger maps going to be possible?
Well, in response to feedback from the community, we've increased the land map size to 2048x2048 for the release. We think this helps to narrow the gap between the pixel-based terrains and the slightly smoother 3D art and gives track creators more to play with, too.The new track editor is vastly improved and features a bigger map size. Image Credit: Curious Chicken Games
As GeneRally 2 is set to feature elements like tire wear, fuel consumption and suspension physics. How difficult is it to toe the line between fun and implementation of realistic features like that?
Arguably this is the most difficult part of the equation for us – and specifically for Markku, who’s put a huge amount of work into the physics implementations. Our desire behind implementing a physics model based on reality was to have handling that was believable, varied and had a lot of depth to it. GeneRally’s physics, whilst far from anything you could call “simulation”, had a depth to them that didn't really exist in the arcade games of the time – or even in the arcade games of the present day.Markku had a strong interest in doing things “the physics way” and adding layers on top of that to lower the barrier-to-entry. As a result we have a physics simulation that is based on modelled realistic behaviours – with physics simulation parameters you’d be thrilled to find in a “sim-cade" title – but we also have something close to what I suppose you’d call “driving aids” that we can layer on top of each car individually to make it a little more manageable when driving with the keyboard or controller.
As a result, we can set up a believable set of car physics using the everything from spring rates to tyre pressures and differential type... and then we can dial it in for controller and keyboard play by adding things like traction control, auto-slide correction, etc. We’ve got some cars that rely more heavily on these features, and some that rely more heavily on the realistic aspects of the physics.
Customizability is probably the word that first comes to mind for most when talking about GeneRally. Are there going to be more integrated editors?
We’ll start with the Track Editor, as that was always GeneRally's "killer feature” - but we have a very open internal discussion about what we’ll do for other things (for example cars). As our team is quite small – and we want to prefer quality over quantity – it’s impossible for us to say at this stage what we will end up doing, but we talk about this topic on a regular basis.Console Versions & VR?
Integrating online features opens a lot of new possibilities for GeneRally 2. What plans other than being able to share your creations via the Steam Workshop are planned? (i.e. Leaderboards, official events & competitions...)?
Online leaderboards are something we’re very, very keen to implement – and you’ll probably see at least some iteration of that during the Early Access period. Official events and competitions are things that we have on our “we’d like to do this in the future” list – but obviously that largely depends on there being demand for that in the player base.What are you most excited for in GeneRally 2?
I’m most excited about it releasing – a lot of things have come and gone in the past decade, but the goal of finishing GeneRally 2 has remained.In terms of something specific about the game itself, I’m most excited about the Track Editor. When I was just a regular player of GeneRally, I lost many hundreds of hours making tracks – and the Track Editor in GeneRally 2 feels to me like such a massive step up that I’m excited to find some time to actually build more tracks myself.
Also, in terms of the Track Editor, I’m excited to see what other people will do with it – there were so many amazing tracks for GeneRally, so I have high hopes for GeneRally 2!
Could there be console versions of GeneRally 2 in the future?
Other platforms are absolutely on the agenda if it’s viable for us to do. We’re a small team, so we don’t want to bite off more than we can chew... but we’d very happily see GeneRally 2 on other platforms.As VR is becoming increasingly popular in gaming and especially racing games, is implementation something you are thinking of? GeneRally's top-down view could be an interesting new perspective.
This is something I’ve thought of many times – the idea of standing around a track, playing GeneRally 2 like I played with slot car tracks as a kid. No idea if we'll ever go down that road, but I think it could be fun.What time frame are you aiming for regarding the full release?
We’re hoping we’ll be somewhere around a year in Early Access. We don’t want to rush it – we want to make sure what we’re putting out is high-quality – but we don’t want to be in “Early Access limbo,” either.What developments can we expect once the Early Access version is released?
The big feature coming in Early Access will be online multiplayer. We’ll also be adding cars; tracks; improving the AI; adding more features and objects to the Track Editor; and other things, too. We’ll have a full update about what we're aiming for a little closer to the Early Access release – but those are the big things on our radar. We’ll also add some form of support for importing tracks from GeneRally – so people can bring their existing creations into the new game and take advantage of its new features and visual upgrades.GeneRally 2 will be available via Steam Early Access on May 30th and can already be wishlisted. What are you most excited about after reading James' insight? Let us know in the comments below!
