#aquirisgs

Hi, soldiers!

as most of you have already noticed, Ballistic Free to Play ceased operations yesterday. If you access the game now, you will be able to redeem your Steam code for Ballistic Overkill. In case you haven't spent $6.99 or more on the Free to Play version, here you have our pre-order page. The game will be available with a 15% off until Early Access launch, next 8th of October:

http://www.ballistic.com/preorder/

Remember that with the code you will be able to activate the game on Steam, but you won't be able to install and play it until 8th of October.

Horizon Chase is now available on the appStore!

Here we have some of the first impressions/reviews the game got: 

“What you get with Horizon Chase is a love letter to racers from a bygone era, which not only faithfully recreates the aesthetic and simultaneously modernises it; but one that brings the aural fanfare and timeless gameplay that racers of yesteryear had in spades.“ - retrocollect

“Bus ride to work was sweetened by @Horizon_Chase today. Great game, fantastic music! Well done, @AquirisGS” - Superfrog1887

“Outrun-tastic. Look at the colours! @Horizon_Chase makes me want an iOS device for a hot minute.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDVSRmhiP0 … /via @michaelheald - @lucpestille

“I need that soundtrack in me.” - @MegaSlippers

“Thanks for this game. I've been waiting for this dream to come true since 1993. That's 22 years of waiting. I love you.” - jaildesigner

“Thanks for delivering on all the promises, I haven't been this excited about racing since Scalextric http://youtu.be/oQpRglD97Vs“ - @dreadnokv1

This week we make a turn towards the technical art aspect of the project. We talk with our Art Director Amilton Diesel.

Could you explain how rain works in the game and which are the main technical challenges for this effect?

Instead of particles, we opted for a distorted mesh with vertex displacement (1) and UV scroll (2). That gave us more flexibility to set the direction of the rain according to the car acceleration when it’s turning. As you can see in the picture, to avoid unnecessary waste of processing we limited the range of the effect only to the area that’s visible around the car.

The biggest challenge was to make the rain effect to match with the feeling of the speed. The rain couldn’t be static, neither move exactly at the same speed of the car, that will make it go artificially faster.

Is there any kind of optimization in the game effects or advice you could give other devs that could also be thinking

Good performance and constant frame rate are very important for racing games, mainly to preserve the inmersion and feeling of speed. There will always be many objects to render, but most of them will be far from the player, using LODs (3) is a good practice since there is no chance to use Occlusion Culling (4). The objects are rapidly passing through players eyes, that gives us the freedom to make simple and varied shapes, instead of very detailed and repetitive ones.

Technical glossary:

Vertex displacement: Resource that alters, geometrically, the position of two vertex in 3D space.

UV scroll: This technique consists in displacing the coordinates of a texture to give the illusion that it’s moving in the opposite direction.

LOD: Level Of Detail. The game object models change for simpler ones as they get more distant from the player.

Here's Horizon Chase's game designer, Felipe Dal Molin, he's working really hard to ensure the game feels and plays at its finest!