Exo Rally, State of the Game - March 2024

First Exo Rally update for 2024, here it is!

New Planet, “Tensei”

Tensei (named “Start Planet” internally!) is essentially complete. It features mostly flat plains and rolling hills, nothing too harsh that you can smack into (just some fluffy ‘feather trees’), and both low gravity ~7m/s2 vs Earth’s 9.81 m/s2 and higher atmospheric drag (amplifies the low G feel) which generally means softer landings and lower speeds.

Tensei is a salt rich environment, and drivers will want to try and steer clear of the sparkling copper-green salt fields and low hanging brine mist, else you’ll be spending a lot of time in service areas removing extreme salt build-up that can rapidly cause rust and damage half way through a rally.

The idea for now is you’ll start your career on this planet (your team is kinda budget locked here), hoping for an invite into the wider Exo Rally Championship. So you’ll be able to get to grips with the controls on a slightly friendlier/easier planet first, and as soon as you start making meaningful placements (in the top 10 or so), you’ll be able to enter the rest of the planets in the series.

If you're wondering what happened to the Industrial planet, featured in the November update, it's on the back burner for now. Unlike the usual terrain-based planets, this one had more challenges than anticipated, and it was dragging a bit on Rally’s schedule. My current plan is to return to it after doing a “monolith planet”, which will feature more basic shapes/geometry akin to Exo One’s.

I’m super excited to start building the next planet, it should be a wild one! Really hoping I can finish one planet every month or two from here.

Multi-planet Series

You can now race in a series starting from Tensei and ending on Dhool, so the driver with the most points over the span of two rallies wins. We plan to have at least 5 when we launch into Early Access, hopefully later this year.

Rhys has been working on the interface and you can see the tabs showing the current progress up top:

Multiple Classes

One of the best parts of most racing games is the progression from slower vehicles all the way up to the fastest, and so we’ve begun implementing new classes, so you can rise through the ranks till you reach the “Rally” class you’ve seen on the Exo Rally videos to date.

We aim to mirror Dakar's format, with highly varied classes, each which drive markedly different. Some won’t feature RCS thrusters at all, and I’m hoping to work in some lore where it’s a debate among Rally fans which is the true ‘top tier’ class, RCS equipped or not, ie “real drivers don't use cheat-thrusters!" vs "RCS thrusters are faster/more exciting/built for Exo Rally planets!".

Given we only have a tiny budget, and I recently discovered making a rover is big $$$, we’ll be using a mix of our own hand designed rovers (the 6-wheeled RCS rover you’ve seen so far) and quality 3rd party assets, which we plan to update with our own models after we leave Early Access.

Pics for these coming next update once we've done a pass over them for team livery and texturing/material work.

New! (pics below):

• Planet Tensei

• Multi planet series

• First pass multiple classes

• Smaller 4-Wheeled UTV (no RCS, fixed setup)

• - Lower top speed, easier to drive, nimble

• Bigger, 10 ton, 6-Wheeled “Mining Truck” (no RCS, fixed setup)

• - Top heavy, be careful whipping the steering too much or you’ll roll easily

• New ending skybeams that look like search-lights, animated, criss/crossing for extra ‘flair’.

• First pass on NPC driver names, team names, team principals

• Updated leaderboards/standings displays

• Camera changes so driver head stays upright (gives better impression of how the rover is tilting)

• New fancy intro camera shots showing the dropship coming in

• Camera craft (like current-day camera/TV helicopters) that follow the player

• Watch replay footage from the camera craft’s PoV

• High speed wind (WIP)

• - Realistic directional wind for upcoming stormy planets

• - Fight against or use wind to your advantage, and probably wise to stay on the ground a bit more

• Bush/foliage impacts/drag

• Dense gas and water drag improvements