Monthly Archives : October 2014

Radial-G on TV and in the printed press

It’s been a busy week for Radial-G as we’re working towards opening the closed alpha test for multiplayer to those who have responded to our call to arms.

In the meantime, harking back to July when we attended “VR in a Bar” at Loading Bar in Dalston, London, we were featured in the Welsh TV channel S4C show “Y Ile” who were there filming. You can watch the English-subtitled version of the show over on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPzi_K1JLdg

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Then over the weekend we discovered that GamesTM had run an article on Oculus Rift gaming and listed Radial-G as one of the Top 5 Best VR Experiences! Check it out below and be sure to pick up a copy to preserve our first-printed-press milestone!

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Latest Developments – Friday 10th Oct

Hello race fans, we thought it was time to compile a big update dev blog post covering everything that we’ve been up to of late.

Firstly, in case you didn’t hear already, we have been working hard in the background to secure some additional funding to allow to continue development of Radial-G. We have now successfully gained some funding from angels who believe in our dreams and want to assist in the best way they can, with money, to see us realise them. So we’ve commenced development on the first full release of the game with much gusto!

The first outcome of this was the updated single player demo that added support for the latest Oculus VR SDK 0.4.2, Rift VR menus, virtual keyboard support and some in-game graphical and audio tweaks. The demo has now been downloaded over 10,000 times and we have well over 1,000 hot lap times recorded on the leaderboard. Here’s a video of one YouTuber doing their best to crack the Top 20 lap times.

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Once the Single Player Demo update was released, which incidentally you can download from Oculus Share, Rift Arcade Market, WeArVR and IndieDb, we began the process of determining what we could achieve as a first release for the game with the funding levels we had available to us. This was a long and painful process as it meant looking hard at the game design documentation and plans we outlined in our Kickstarter campaign originally, and deciding whether we could afford to include each particular feature or asset or not.

When that was complete, then we were able to set about planning out the development of what we could afford to create and implement into the first release, as well as create the longer term roadmap of features and assets we could implement further down the line with more funding from sales, once released. So for now we’re looking at a new environment with new ships with different handling physics, multiple new tracks and track features including jumps, inverted sections and twists. Most of the funds are going towards adding additional gameplay and features that make the game actually fun to play against other racers, such as the multiplayer code, collisions and weight and gravitas to the ships to give a less “on rails” feeling to the racing.

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We’ve reached out to our Kickstarter backers to apply to become part of the Super Secret Squirrel Test as a thank you for their initial support and ongoing belief in us, which will allow them to take part in alpha test sessions with us and feedback on the new features and gameplay types we’re working on. Once we have the alpha build to a stage we are happy with, we will look at releasing a build as your initial download for our Steam Early Access profile, which will then be regularly updated until v1.0 full public release at the end of 2014.

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Now that we have funded development with a release window, we are expecting to be able to get more media coverage with all those websites who weren’t interested in covering yet another Kickstarter game campaign. IGN has created a Radial-G wiki page, which we will look to populate soon. We’ve already had some great coverage on the larger sites such as Polygon, PC Gamer, CVG and Kotaku-UK so hopefully we’ll gain the attention of others, including IGN and Eurogamer, as well as key YouTubers to help boost our reach as we near launch. Our PR approach has always been open and honest, using guerilla tactics and we don’t intend on changing that. We managed to generate over 60 articles during the Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight campaigns but we know that a strong product sells itself, something that we believe we have! We might not make such bold claims as “Game of the Year” (just yet) but we’re feeling pretty confident that we’ll produce the best arcade racing experience in VR!

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Talking of VR, we had a minor setback when our Oculus Rift DK2 headset mysteriously died on us but Oculus VR Support came to our rescue and have shipped a replacement unit to us quickly in order to not interrupt development! Big <3 to Oculus VR Support! But, with all this talk of VR, and one thing that became apparent from our Kickstarter campaign, is we focussed too hard on this aspect and weren’t loud enough about playing the game without VR. So we are ensuring that the game experience and fun factor is going to be THE BEST whether you are playing on a monitor, TV -or- VR headset!

Moving forward, you can keep up to date with development of the full game here on our official website, as well as the profile on IndieDb and our social media feeds for Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Looking at the timeline of key events, we are currently here:

Single Player Demo launch > Steam Greenlight launch > Kickstarter launch > Kickstarter success > Pass Steam Greenlight > Get funding > Main game development > Steam Early Access > v1.0 Public Release on Steam