As you know, Wreckfest is all about recreating a visceral racing experience in total, and realistic environments play a very important role in that. Since we have come to learn that you cannot really create an authentic race track from the top of your head we involve ourselves in regular field trips to local motorsports avenues. One of these little ‘research excursions’ took place a couple of weeks ago when we visited a motorsports center in southern Finland that’s a venue to many exciting motorsports activities, folk-racing in particular. Although we take cues from banger racing and demolition derby, Scandinavian folk-racing has always been our main source of inspiration for the game so a track like this one is a perfect reference for us.
It wasn’t a race day so the track was empty (save for a couple of karting guys doing practice runs) but we didn’t mind it at all since our plan this time was to capture the environment with our digital cameras, the idea being that we could later on use the photographic references captured by us to recreate the track details and various environmental props in-game. However, while shooting all the lovely details on location we came up with a wild idea: what if, instead of just recreating some of the details, we would recreate the complete track in-game? We thought that would be pretty neat so that’s exactly what we did! Here’s a couple of screenshots from the first version:
Real folk-racing tracks are not often seen in games, but we figured something like this specific track would make a perfect match for our kind of rough, bumper-to-bumper folk-racing. As you can see the track is obviously still in early stages of development, but you can already make out the general layout as well as get some idea of the environment. It will take weeks of additional development to get this track to its final polished stage, but as a result you will have a real race track to race around, faithfully recreated in the game.
Our next update will contain a playable prototype of the track so that you can take a sneak peek at it and let us hear your opinion on it. Speaking about the update, it will also contain a feature that many of you have been anxiously waiting for: career gameplay! For the first time ever you will actually have to start from scratch and earn money to buy better cars and parts. The career will still lack many of the planned features but you will already have an opportunity to get a glimpse of what we have in store for you. Many other improvements are also in the pipeline, but more news later!
