So, what is it that I'm looking at?

The game that you are looking at, is PalmRide, a driving game inspired by classic games like OutRun and Rad Racer. It is still under development, but we are determined to finish it and publish it on Steam (it already has a Steam page where you can find a free demo. If you like the demo, you might consider wishlisting and following the game).

The team

Right now, we are just three guys working on this game, me (SilviuShader, the person who is writing these things over here), COVALENT, and Reneg8studio. I do game design, programming, COVALENT does game design, sound effects and music, and Reneg8studio does most of the art and graphical assets.

Some backstory

I am a Computer Science student at the University of Bucharest and we had to make a personal project for a course. We got to choose what the project we're working on is, so I decided to make a pseudo3D racing game (like Outrun), so I followed this excellent article about pseudo3D road rendering. And got some... interesting results...

(note that no cat was harmed while taking that photo)

I continued working on this project for college and got a pretty cool game.

After the project was pretty much finished (and I was about to get a good grade for this project), I asked reddit if I should turn this into a full game, and I was surprised to see that people really reacted to that post and they wanted this to be a full game... so I started working on PalmRide.

For anyone interested, here's the source code for that project.

And now, the story of PalmRide!

I basically rewrote everything that I originally wrote for that college project, but this time I used C# and MonoGame (for the college project I used C++ and DirectXTK... similar things...)

Here is the earliest screenshot I got from PalmRide (I could probably get some screenshots from earlier versions of the game, but they wouldn't be “authentic”)

Soon, vehicles were added and we started working on the city.

Enough of the past

Some more months into development, and the game looked like this:

As it's more or less obvious from the screenshots, lots of things were added... things like: police cars and motorcycles, bullets, a fly game mechanic, gearbox system, backgrounds, music visualizers, speed bumps, helicopters (just to name a few).

Soon, Dev.Play came and I basically reskinned the entire game for the event. I changed the art direction to a more classic/ pixelated style. The game looked like this:

I posted one video on Reddit when the game looked like that and I recived a message from Reneg8studio. He wanted to design a better car for the game. Since then, he is a member of the team, and basically reskinned the entire game (again).

At the beginning of 2021 we launched a demo on Steam, and the amount of positive feedback it received was quite overwhelming for me, as this was the first time that people actually played a game that I've worked on.

The demo looked like this:

Now the game very close to being finished, and we'll publish it soon. There are lots of Things that were added since the Demo was released. Here's how the game looks at the time of writing this:

Again, there are things in the game that aren't really obvious from the screenshots (like the ability to import your own music into the game, or the ranked leaderboard game mode).

We'll continue working on this game, adding new features and polishing the current game that we have. We hope we'll be able to release the game on Steam in Q3 2021, but keep in mind that we are just some regular people working on a driving game in our spare time (this means, don't shout at us if we release the game later in 2021... After all, a polished game is better than a rushed game).

That is pretty much all about the evolution and the future of the game, if you are interested in this game, please wishlist us on Steam and follow us on social media for future updates (links below). Thank you!