Hello rally drivers!

Shakedown Rally has now been out for a week! And it's been a blast. I've been enjoying seeing your feedback, fast times, and even your mods!

A little background..

I realized I owe you a little backstory.. In one of the future updates I will talk more about the custom engine and how it came to be, but first of, why the name Shakedown? "Shakedown" is a particular term used in rallying, as WRC official glossary says:

Shakedown:    The opportunity for crews to test their competition cars on terrain similar to the rally before the event starts.

It's the last test before the start of the rally, a sort of a final rehearsal. This is exactly why I called the game like that, it is similarly a test of my own custom engine written in C++. Since I had no idea if it would even work on machines other than mine, I am using this project as a test. Btw, this is also the reason why the car is just plain white, rally cars are often run in plain white when testing.

But you might ask, if this game is a test, does that mean the game is not a real game?? Well, it used to be "just a test", I really gave it this name because I wanted to publish it as a sort of a jam game, and then go on with my other projects and life.. But now that I've seen your response after the release, my thought of it has changed, so yeah, it is a REAL game now :) And greatly thanks to:

Modding

Even though I didn't intend to make Shakedown moddable right away, I did leave asset files just there in game folders "out in the open". Of course, that didn't stop people from messing with them!

As soon as I told Mr F that you can actually change the shaders if you wish, he jumped on the opportunity to play with them. And play he did:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1617983105167691776

You don't need drugs for this one. The tweet has cranked up some likes, waaay more than the release of the game 🤣

Meanwhile, @Farfadet46 was quick to jump to making a monster truck. For this one I had to make a new build where I exposed wheel radius so he could have big wheels🙂

@Pirxos has put a model of an old rusty car from the game he is working on: Fumes (play it, it's cool!) and even made a little desert.

I will post a little "modding spotlight" just like this in every future blog post.

All these mods fill my heart because I have actually started gamedev with modding myself! One of the first games I modded was rFactor, where I made a couple of tracks and cars, so it is veeeery similar to what I'm seeing today made for my own game! Nice!

That said, I really want Shakedown to become very mod friendly! I remember the countless hours I have spent figuring out why the game I was modding is crashing when I try to load my assets, reading forum posts to get any semblance of what is going on, and wrestling with plugins and broken editors. I know the pain, so I want to make it easy to mod, and catch any errors and present them to modders in clearest way possible. This is also why, if you try to mod, you should report any crashes and errors (but check the log.txt first!)

I have already started making a little modding documentation, just with the most common problems and how-tos. Although for the current state of the game, which is not very modding friendly. So obviously, this will get updated every time I add new modding features.

I have also opened a post for mods, so send your own mods here!

Updates and fixes

It's important to note that I keep fixing problems daily and pushing new updates! I realized that a lot of people are not aware new versions are coming out and they keep playing the old builds with a lot of issues. Sometimes players report problems that have been fixed a couple of days earlier. If you use the itch app, it should update automatically. If you simply download from the web page, yeah, you will have to re-download new updates.

Most importantly, I have fixed 2 most common crashes people were having. One caused by neutral gear where the car would fly to infinity (there was a divide by zero 😅), and another caused by alt-tabbing when in fullscreen.

I have moved the changelog from itch to github, so that it's easier for me to update it.

I've found out that the game runs really good on most systems, but there has been one report of the game not starting at all under Windows 11. I.e. the application crashes so soon that not even a single log gets submitted. I have no idea what's that caused by so I'll have to investigate further. If it happens to you, please report! And that brings me to...

Reporting issues

PLEASE submit issues to https://github.com/nothke/shakedown-docs/issues. If you don't have a github account, you can also write them down in itch comments on the game page.

Upcoming features

So far, I haven't had any big feature updates except for exposing parameters in the config and bug fixing and a little hole fixing on the track model. The first big new feature is going to be what I call "splat materials", they allow you to blend different surfaces on a single material. They are blended using vertex color, and he game can then pick up those values and blend them. In this way, I (and modders) will be able to add on different patches of surfaces, for example dirt split across a corner apex, wet puddles, or snow! Here is a preview of system in action:

I was planning to already release this feature but I have some bugs so it will wait to be fully ready and bug free.

And here's another reminder that I am streaming development of these new features on twitch.tv/nothke, and all my past videos will be posted in this playlist on YouTube.

What's the fastest time??

Since there is no high score board, or replays the only way to report fast times is via sharing pictures of videos of your time. Although there's no guarantee you won't mess with files.. So, take it with a grain of salt. But you can trust me (right?) because it looks like I hold the record right now at 141.34. Closely followed by Tekky at 141.62:

A beautiful screenshot of my car flying through the air as I tumble after finish.

Here's also a video of Armando from my discord server driving another sub-142 run, just so you can see how a great run looks like:

And finally, for any questions, suggestions, feedback, modding talk, general games talk and posting pretty pictures and videos of rallies, join my discord!!

Until the next post, happy driving!