Nick Horth talks with Project Cars ' creative director Andy Tudor about racing, rain and... Resident Evil?

The team at Slightly Mad Studios are busy putting the finishing touches on their ambitious, crowd-funded racer Project Cars, which is finally inching towards a November release date after a lengthy development period. I managed to corner creative director Andy Tudor for a chat about the changing face of racing games, hardcore rain effects and, oddly enough, Resident Evil.

Strategy Informer: First off, you describe Project Cars as the first AAA crowdfunded racing game. What made you choose the crowd-funding model?

Andy Tudor: Basically we worked on GTR, GT: Legends, GTR 2, they were very successful and everyone was happy, we did Need for Speed, rebooted that franchise with Shift 1 and 2, and by then it was like “we just want to do our own thing”. But that was at a time when it was super risky for big publishers to give us the money to actually get that done. So here we were saying “we want to go out on our own, we've got this new game with this cool IP”, and that was risky for publishers, especially when games take so long to make and cost so much money. It was at a time when the next generation consoles hadn't really been announced, so everyone was hedging their bets and waiting to see what was going on.

So here we here thinking “Shit, we've got this wicked concept for a game, and we can't get it greenlit!” So we thought, right, we'll do it ourselves. So Kickstarter was a big thing in the US, but it hadn't had a real success story yet, and it wasn't in the UK at the time. So we thought we'd do our own. Ever since then it's allowed us to do what we want, so the community has been involved since day one, we give them money back depending on the success of the game and their contribution, they can talk to us directly, which is something Kickstarter doesn't really do. So that's why we wanted to do it; one through necessity, and two because we felt it was the right thing to do – speaking directly to the players rather than people in meeting rooms with ties. Any game can do this, any genre. We're the first AAA game to do it, so all eyes are on us to make sure we get it right and see how successful we are with it. We firmly believe it's the right thing to do, and being able to speak to the players every day is amazing.


Strategy Informer: Do you think there are things you can do in your game with crowdfunding that you just couldn't get away with in a traditional publishing model?

Andy Tudor: Absolutely, like we make our own deadlines. We don't have milestones, we just add more features and fix things and listen to the community. If they don't think our time is best spent on those things they tell us and that gives us a degree of confidence that what we're doing is exactly what players actually want. One example we always like mentioning is Rally; we were going to put Rally in the game, but it's a 'loose surface' motorsport, there's lots of dirt and mud and other things moving under the tyres, so everyone was like “no, just concentrate on tarmac stuff for now, that can always come in the future.” So okay, fine. Even though at some point we wanted to get to it, and we may do in the future, yeah fair enough. The guys want more tarmac-based stuff, we'd better do that.

Strategy Informer: Sometimes with Kickstarters I think it's a case of developers adding in way too much unnecessary or ill-thought out content because they feel they have to, and that isn't always a good thing.

Andy Tudor: Absolutely, it's not. We come up with features and we put it out there, and the community go “that's awesome, but what if it had this, and this and this”, and it snowballs. It's kind of like self-policing, so the things in the forum that have the most posts, the ones constantly at the top of the list when you go to post, those are the ones that are the key features. The ones we put out there to no noise at all, those are the ones we don't focus on. Again, it gives us confidence that what we're making is something that players really want to actually play.

Strategy Informer: And your community is kind of helping you develop the game itself to some extent?

Andy Tudor: Absolutely, they're like some kind of army. Every single screenshot you've seen from the last two years has been made by a community member. I don't think I've ever taken a screenshot myself. All our trailers, up until the most recent ones, were done by the community as well. They've obviously got a lot of time on their hands, and it's great. We can't ask for any more. The very reason that people like yourself even come to this is because hopefully you've heard of us, and if we are a indie studio working on a game seen as a Gran Turismo, Forza competitor, then the community has done their job. Because they've got it into the public eye that there's a game coming out that looks ******* phenomenal, and everyone wants to play. But they also work on the game themselves, they work on the liveries for the game, they're working on the achievement icons right now, they've done the posters for the career events and things like that. They've given us feedback on the game, the handling, requested certain cars. It's their game. It is a tagline, “by racers for racers”, but it's true. It's not just a marketing thing.


Strategy Informer: There was some controversy last week when Ubisoft mentioned they would be capping The Crew at 30 FPS. I wondered what you though about that. Is it something you'd consider with Project Cars

Andy Tudor: I read that. I was hoping someone would ask about that! It's funny that, isn't it? So The Crew came out and said that the PC version would be 30 frames per second, and you can alter it with a workaround...

Strategy Informer: You can apparently set it up to 60 FPS, but if you put it higher than that the game defaults it back down.

Andy Tudor: Oh, well that's lovely of them. Here we are, running the game at 4K resolution, 12K resolution, personally I've seen the game running at 128 frames per second or something like that. Lovely for them, what a shame. It's our intention to always keep ahead of the competition with this 'beyond reality' idea. Graphics aren't everything, but when it does come to graphics we just want to blow it out the water. “You're doing 4K? Okay, we're doing 12K. You've got the Oculus Rift support? Okay, we've got Morpheus as well.” We just want to keep ahead of the game. I know it's a bit... childish? (laughs) But the tech is there – the power of the PC these days, what we're getting out the consoles, it's phenomenal. The engine, it's our own MADNESS engine. It's wicked, the stuff we can do in the game is fantastic. We're targeting 1080p and 60 frames on consoles, we've got a load of stuff going on on-screen, but that is always the target. Please don't hate us if it ends up at a lower frame rate, but 60 frames and 1080p is always the target for us. If it's going to compromise gameplay or the experience there will have to be balance, but so far we've got crossed fingers.

Strategy Informer: The game certainly looks impressive, but you're keen to point out that weather effects and so on aren't just eye candy, they really affect the core gameplay.

Andy Tudor: Yeah, so you can go back to our forum, to the very first post where we discussed what we thought the vision for the game should be, and there are two columns; 'best in class' and 'innovation.' 'Best in class' is all the stuff you might have seen in previous games, but we're going to do it better than anyone else. The other thing, 'innovations', is something that people have never seen before. When it comes to weather, it's a bit of both. There are other games with weather out there, and we kind of hope that our looks the best. Certainly when you look at the individual spatters of rain on the windscreen and bodywork, the rain dripping into puddles, those puddles then drying out, we've gone above and beyond on that kind of stuff. Equally, it has added value for gameplay.

When we did night racing in Shift 2, we didn't look at what other games had done because they were not authentic. They weren't what it is really like for drivers, and you can go and speak to real-life racing drivers and they'll tell you exactly the same. You need to know the track inside out during the day to even attempt it at night, because they don't have giant neon signs pointing the way. There are some tracks that are floodlit, and there's no challenge there, because everything is lit up super-bright. So we looked at Resident Evil. Really. It's dark, you've got a torchlight, that's it. It's a scary experience, you know? If you were to turn the lights on, no challenge. The idea in Shift 2 was that if you're going round the track you need to know it in the daytime, because at night your headlights are the only guiding light at all. If your headlights fail, you're done.

When it's weather, it's exactly the same. When it starts raining you're going to have to have some strategy there, whether to come into the pits or not. Your pit engineer will tell you through the microphone of impending weather changes, as well as a bunch of other stuff. When you go into the pits you can change your tyres, do a bunch of other stuff, we've got a fully animated pit crew. When you go out again it is harder, you've got other things to consider, like puddles and braking points and sliding, and locking your tyres. And then, because it's dynamic, it could go clear again. Now you're like “do I stay out on these tyres, or go in again?”. It adds strategy, adds gameplay and that's why it's innovative, because it's not just a visual effect that we layer over things.


Strategy Informer: You've talked about how you want to avoid grind in the Career mode, and that all cars will be available from the start of a singleplayer game. Could you tell us a little more about how Career mode works?

Andy Tudor: Yep, every car is unlocked from day one, every track's unlocked from day one, there's no currency in the game whatsoever. So let's go through it. Just like in Madden, just like in FIFA you create a driver, give him a first name, last name, nationality, car number, all that kind of stuff and then you're presented with the game. So then where do you want to start? Do you want to start in karts, in tier eight, or do you want to go to Le Mans in tier one, or anything in between. In FIFA you can choose Man Utd straight away, you don't have to start down in Grimsby and work your way up. Some people do, and they can do that in Project Cars as well, you can work your way in a kind of franchise mode, building your driver up and progressing through the levels.

We call those 'Historic Goals', so that would be a 'Zero to Hero' goal, but if you just want to jump into touring cars and dominate that championship again and again, you can do that. That's the 'Defending Champion' goal. So you can do whatever you want in any order, you can do none of them, one of them, and if you want to do all of them there's a special level called the 'Hall of Fame'. That involves signing endorsement deals, because as you progress through the career you'll be unlocking accolades, which are kind of like the way in which teams scout you. Just like in real life, if you win this event here, you'll garner the attention of a certain team. Again, that feels very much like NBA 2K or something like that, where you're signing endorsement deals with big teams and you can really see your success. We've got a bunch of trophies and achievements there as well, so it puts the focus back on the career and the driver and the progression there, rather than your bank account. All that kind of stuff is more like a sandbox experience for the next generation of gamers who are used to things like Minecraft, games that have a more exploratory experience.

Many thanks to Andy Tudor for speaking to me. If you want to find out more about Project Cars I point you to our hands-on preview. The game is still set for a November 2014 release on PC and next-gen consoles, so not long to wait now, racing fans.