RALLY UK Dev Diary #1 Feature

TotalVideoGames begins the first of a number of new diaries which starts with a very interesting Rally title from a UK developer called Brain in A Jar, called simply Rally UK, which presently will be its working title. The nucleus of the team has worked for one of the biggest publishers - Psygnosis - but sadly this giant of a publisher is no longer around. However, some of the team that worked on a title for them along with some new talent are beavering away on what they believe is an exciting and impressive game. A few of the team have also worked on a Ferrari game that was never released but that we saw and we can tell you it was possibly one of the best racing games never to be released! Why was it never released? Best ask Acclaim!

Over the next few months we shall be getting a full and exclusive insight into the making of their game, along with their aspirations, inspirations, plus good and old-fashioned hard graft.

In this first part Carl Dalton, who is the lead artist at Brain in a Jar, will begin by giving some background of the team, whilst highlighting their vision for their game.

Both Carl and Matthew Gabriel, the heart of the company, were part of the team at Psygnosis that created Lander! Although the team is presently small - 5 with outside assets/expertise sourced when needed - it is a truly focused team and more expertise could be moved in as the game progresses.

Brain In A Jar and the Development of Rally UK.

We broke away from Psygnosis about five years ago, where the founders of Brain in a Jar had been working together on projects like â??Landerâ??. We knew that what we really wanted to do was to make racing games. We arenâ??t obsessive about racing â?“ there are those of us that could easily spend 3 or 4 hours most nights racing online (current favourite â?“ â??Live for Speedâ??) but thatâ??s normal, rightâ?¦? Also, Rik has a 483BHP Lexus Vertex V300 twin turbo heâ??s imported from Japan (and modified) but he never drives it fastâ?¦. honestly officer.

We threw ourselves into creating a Ferrari game for Acclaim, and everything was going fantastically â?“ the game was looking good and getting good previews, and the code was building into a solid and versatile engineâ?¦ right up to the point when the license fell through and the game had to be canned. We did some work on a rally game for Warthog to keep ourselves going and then turned to developing â??IndyCar Seriesâ?? for Codemasters.

I believe we have not only the experience and expertise to create a Rally game that will be both innovative and great to play but as you can see some of our past experience prove that we understand the mechanics - excuse the pun - of creating a game with style.

Last autumn, with Indy complete and in the stores, disaster struck and Brain in a Jar nearly died. The company was saved, but at a high cost and with the future very unclear, until now that isâ?¦.

Rally UK has always been an obvious game for us to do. The physics engine that weâ??ve developed is complex and accurate enough to handle ping-pong to an aircraft flight model. This coupled with the mechanical model that weâ??ve developed for the cars allows us to realistically toy with the limits of what a car can do â?“ from the way the suspension handles in extreme conditions, to the internal damage taken by the carâ??s engine.

One of the things weâ??re keen to do with our rally game for Oxygen, our publisher, is to give the player absolute control of the set-up of the car. Most of us here have an interest in real-world car mechanics, and weâ??re setting the cars up so that most of the things a mechanic could do to a real car the player can do to the car in this.

Oxygen wants the work to go into the gameplay first and foremost. They want to be able to release games for 15 to 25 pounds but with all the gameplay of a full price game. What they arenâ??t interested in is flashy video sequences and such, so that brings us back to the car dynamics, the physics, and the grass roots â??feelâ?? of the drive. Thatâ??s not to say that the graphics and presentation arenâ??t going to be up to par, weâ??re just not going to be spending six months motion capturing course marshals that amble about in a realistic manner, as you scream by at ninety miles-per-hour in a cloud of dust! The game-playing experience is our holy grail.

Our first challenge was to get the game playable as fast as possible. Often in development publishers push to create â??market assetsâ?? up front â?“ hi-res models, demo code modules, and so on, that donâ??t necessarily lead to a playable game. However, with â??Rallyâ?? the only bit of the game that really matters is the game-play, and weâ??re really lucky that weâ??ve had five years to get a lot of the tough sums done. We can already handle all sorts of effects â?“ for example the carâ??s brake-lights illuminating the dust thrown up behind the vehicle, and thatâ??s all calculated in real-time based on code we developed months (even years) ago â?“ so the engine was solid, stable and polished before we signed with Oxygen.

In early February we had an inaugural first play of the game â?“ hurling a car round a test-track that weâ??ve built. Now weâ??re just passing versions of the game back and forth amongst ourselves and with Oxygen, saying, â??Well how about thisâ?¦ howâ??s this feeling nowâ?¦?â? Only when we have the feel right are we going to worry about things like menu screens and intro movies - all of this is taking a supporting role, as it were, to the game-play.

Next on the â??to doâ?? list? More tracks. We need to get the actual racing tracks done, and weâ??re also building a couple of â??displayâ?? tracks (or special stages, if you like) that allow the player to throw the car around and really have fun. We can push our in-game cars to do anything that a real car can do (more even, since the spectre of irreparable damage and broken bones doesnâ??t loom large!). So weâ??re going to let the player have fun with this! Jumps, crests and dips â?“ rather more extreme than youâ??d find on a real rally course (although weâ??re not talking â??Wacky Racesâ?? here!), designed to propel the player on an adrenaline-inducing ride!

There shouldnâ??t be too many nasty surprises with the development (famous last words!) as the first thing we did was to create and re-draft a detailed design document, which forced us to think about potential problems right from the start, and to plan our solutions before the problems even arose. Now weâ??re just getting on with it.

We now have a version of the game that he can drop art into without special coding, and the programming tasks are clearly defined so we know what to do and when it needs doing. While it might sound like more fun to just make it up as we go along, by having a plan set out â??up frontâ?? we know what we can and canâ??t get into the game, and, more importantly, we end up with a better game.

But weâ??ve got a lot to do to get the game out for Augustâ?¦.

Next update we delve a little into the cars and the mechanics behind them...