Garth Midgley and the team at GOATi Entertainment have build their futuristic racing game 22 Racing Series from the ground up.
Garth Midgley has been making 22 Racing Series for nearly ten years with his company GOATi Entertainment , building his own engine and developing a hybrid racing game that combines the elements of Real Time Strategy games and technical racers like Gran Turismo.
Real time strategy and racing genres are combined into an unlikely fusion.
Creating an experience where a bad start doesn’t mean you’ll be stuck in the back till the end, without the pesky rubber-banding mechanics.
The game has just launched it's crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to fund the final stages of development as it races across the line.
"It’s a racing game where you use real physics to drive at 1000 plus kilometres per hour. It’s actually using gravity and physics that why we call it a future physics racer, you can compete for track sectors that give you resources that you can spend in the race on different boosts and abilities to help you and your team mid race."
Instead of using an off the shelf game engine like Unity or Unreal, 22 Racing Series is built around an engine created specifically for it.
"When we started development Unreal was not a free engine it cost about a million dollars per SKU to use and because we were going to build such a bespoke physics based fast paced game we didn’t want to be reliant on someone else's engine and have them change something that ruined our game’s performance."
Esports was always on Garth's mind, he saw the potential of competitive gaming long before the many leagues we have today started. 22 Racing Series is being made with large competitions in mind from the get go.
"I got interest in esports 20 years ago when Counter Strike was released, racing games should be a perfect fit for esports but if a racing was going to be popular for an esport when would it have to be so we kind of set out with that them in mind."
After a decade of part time development the game is very close to completion, Garth hopes that a successful Kickstarter campaign will allow his team to work on the game full time for release within the next year.
"We tried to get this out off our own backs but we’ve been doing other games on the side to make money, doing contracts for other people and outsourcing. Working on things like LA Noire, Darksiders 2 and Zelda, we worked on so many other games during this time to fund our own development. But it was really slowing us down, spending only about a month or two per year working on our own game. "
"So these last couple of years we’ve just gone full bore into getting 22 done and we’ve gotten so close to the end but we’ve run out of money. So if we can get some money and keep on working this we can get it out in 6 - 8 months in a really good shape. "
You can check out 22 Racing Series on Kickstarter here, or check out our coverage at PAX Australia 2019 below:
