POSTMORTEM: HOT LAP RACING
This is the post mortem of Hot Lap Racing, a light sim-cade racing game released on Nintendo Switch and PC, developed by Zero Games Studios in collaboration with Vision Réelle, published by Maximum Entertainment.
INTRODUCTION/ STARTING POINT
Hot Lap Racing had been released on July 16th 2024.
It's only the third "personal project" of Zero Games Studios in 11 years.
And as we made a public post mortem for Extreme Gear Demolition Arena years ago, why not for this game too ?
After spending years making game for many different publishers and helping big (or not so big) studios release their games, Zero Games Studios wanted to work on something more personal. We first spent some time working on a turn-based strategy game, but switched to the idea of a racing game after a meeting between Pierre-Luc Vettier (Zero Games CEO) and Jonathan Marole (Vision Réelle CEO) in which emerged idea of a game that could be enjoyed by every racing enthusiasts (even total beginners) while keeping the spirit of realistic racing.
RESUME OF THE GAME AND DEV HISTORY
Idea of the game came from a time attack racing game prototype coming from
Vision Réelle. It was a bit rough, but all basics were promising and with a bigger development team, it had potential to become a real racing game.
We quickly decided to aim for the Nintendo Switch as main console for many reasons. Zero Games Studios had extensive development experience on this console, knowing its architecture and limits very well.
Also, the console was perfect match to our audience: we wanted people who enjoy casual gaming sessions to have fun with a racing game. This could include kids wanting to try for first time a racing game with realistic racing tone or more experienced gamers who wanted to play on the go a simple but effective racing game as well.
Our main point was that we didn't wanted just another car game which is not making any sense from racing point of view (there are already a lot of them in the market): we wanted real racing cars (not sports car or luxury cars) on racing tracks to offer to players the sensation of being a real racing driver on their Nintendo Switch.
The game attracted interest from some publishers in quite early stages of development. The mix between a convincing prototype, experienced and passionate development team and low development budget was attractive to many potential partners. We came close to sign a deal very quickly after the very first presentation of an early prototype with a publisher, but they unfortunately ceased activity in the following
weeks.
Few months later, we finally choose to sign with Just For Games, which had been bought by Maximum Entertainment a bit later during development of the game.
(It barely changed anything for us, as we continued to work with same team.)
So that's moment we would like to thanks a lot Thierry Genre, Maximilien Breton and Melodie Maîtreheu, (but also Vincent and Eva) who were our main contacts and whom had been absolutely fantastic during the whole development phase of Hot Lap Racing. Many developers have difficult relationship with their publishers, but on our side, it's been a real pleasure to work with such great people to try to make Hot Lap Racing
successful.
Development team for the game was quite small as budget was tight (around a
million €uro, everything included. Even licensing! Which is a bit
mad when you take a look back at it). In the end, many people are
credited on the game because some people just spent one week or two
working on Hot Lap Racing, but during first half of development there
never been more than a dozen people working on the game at same time.
In the end, it changed in the last months of development when more people came to
help as we needed to be sure to deliver on time. For sure, all of this created some limitations but the team had this in mind from start and tried to find clever solutions to push for best quality possible despite all the heavy constraint.
SO, WHAT WENT RIGHT ?
A/ This game is a miracle
Over our more than 11 years of existence, Zero Games worked on many
different games and projects (around more than 30 if my memory is still good), and we often says that having a game released is always a bit of a miracle as making games is something that could be sometimes very complicated -also because we witnessed a lot of projects being killed before being released-.
It never been so true with Hot Lap Racing.
Making a racing game using internal physics engine, with online multiplayer, local multiplayer, more than 50 different realistic cars, realistic tracks, official brands, targeted for Nintendo Switch, with targeted budget under one million €uros, with tight planning, while trying to keep comfortable working conditions for the team was definitely a miracle.
And even some very experienced people who worked on this project, or witnessed its development from external point of view are still amazed that the game had been successfully released (and in time !)
Hundred elements could have happenned that could have been project killer as
we needed to not experience any major trouble and having developers and artists not encountering major technical issues.
And that's exactly what happenned. Not even external factors (software or technical problems) caused much problems during production.
B/ Cars and tracks
Some of the people who worked on the game -including the one writting this
public post mortem- are racing enthusiasts. It's just not about cars and related games: it's about real passion for racing and everything involved around (the technology, the thrill, history, ...).
So, as we began to discuss about the game content, we decided to embrace racing theme by following these 3 crucial rules:
- All cars should be racing cars, or have racing background in its inner conception. We had a list of vehicles in mind and we tried to stick to it as much as possible. We then tried to obtain licensing for each car of our list and in case we failed, we just had to create a derivative by ourselves.
Point is, some of the licensing had been difficult to obtain because some of these vehicles were sometimes quite rare or from defunct manufacturers.
- Track selection should absolutely include as much variety as possible in terms of size and driving style. We wanted technical tracks and fast tracks. We wanted local tracks and FIA graded tracks as well.
Trivia: as we are French, an unusual percentage of tracks from our selection were French as it was easier to ask for the licensing rights if we found an interesting one that we felt could be included in Hot Lap Racing.
- Very early, we decided to put real drivers names in the game as opponents to the players on the track. We thought it would add an extra bit of racing atmosphere as it's always more fun for the players to battle on track against real drivers. Also, it's always more fun to overtake a real champion than a "no-name".
Overall, it all proven to be a good choice. The content of the game had been praised by players and critics as Hot Lap Racing is offering something different from other racing games on these points and people can see how much we were passionate about making this game.
From pure technical point of view, we have put in Hot Lap Racing a lot of attention to the cars as they obviously are the stars of the game. That's why we offer to players some of the most detailed cars on Nintendo Switch, including fully-modelized playable cockpit view. And some of them are exclusive to the game as they are appearing for the very first time officially in a video game, which is something very cool to offer to our players.
C/ It's running on Switch despite heavy features
When we talked about our ambitions about the game to some other industry
professionnals (other studios and publishers), a lot of them thought having all the main features of the game wouldn't work (or very poorly) on the Nintendo Switch.
Let's face it, the Switch CPU is equivalent to a 10 years old average mobile device, which create some limitations (to say the least !). But if you know the console architecture and understand how it works, you can still extract good things from its hardware.
Even if not everything is as polished as some of our competitors, we have lot of cool features that are uncommon for a Switch racing game such as 4 players splitscreen, online multiplayer, full detailed interiors of cars with animated drivers, depth of field going far, possibility to switch on/off traction control of your car while driving, etc...
And overall, the game seems to offers satisfying experience on Nintendo console and we are really happy about this as it was something important in our eyes.
D/ Overall quality
Sure, Hot Lap Racing is not and won't be ever a GOTY contender, but it has found its audience and has a good community who really enjoy the game for its qualities.
In the end, despite its flaws, Hot Lap Racing delivers a good racing experience and matched its goals : the game really provide a good racing experience on Switch that could be enjoyed by many and overall the feedbacks we receive indicates that local multiplayer mode is enjoyed by many people wanting to share this racing experience with their relatives.
With 67 on Metacritics score, even if we hoped for a bit more, we do better than most of other racing games in more or less same gameplay area while being an original IP and offering original gameplay (while some other games in our range rely on features from mobile games or just copy gameplay elements from other games.)
Also, we continue to work on the game, improving slowly all aspects and adding new content at each update. It's an opportunity for us to listen to players feedbacks and
fix some problems we didn't really noticed or had time to improve when we were in the heat of game production. All of this helps to improve the game so our community can continue to enjoy playing Hot Lap Racing while newcomers have access to a game which had seen some of its issues fixed.
SO, WHAT WENT WRONG ?
A/ Technical issues
Limited by time, budget and also cartdrige limitations (as we needed the game to be as light as possible for physical editions), some elements of the game were not as polished as we wanted for release, which forced us to work on updates to improve the game post-launch.
Also, two main elements were often highlighted as weak points of the game : A.I and framerate drops.
A.I is the most complex case we had during production for a very simple reason : the developer we planned to have been in charge of this part finally didn't worked on the project as he took an offer from an other studio. And as you can guess, with such limited ressources, it then became for the studio a problem for the production, but we didn't realized immediately.
Then, it took us a lot of valuable time to set up an other solution by having other developers working on this part, but as they also had to work on other important features, they began to work on A.I efficiently too late during production.
We tried to request some external help from a company specialized in this field, but it wasn't enough in the end as we lost too much time at beginning of the project.
Even if things began to improve slowly after each new update, all of this led to having a less effective A.I than expected at release and it had huge impact on the critics.
The other big topic was framerate drops. In some tracks or in particular conditions, the Nintendo Switch players experienced framerate drops during races. To make things worse, it could have been unnoticed most of the time if we choose to not have current motion blur FX which increase this feedback (but turning it off then remove speed sensations).
Here also, we tried to fix it in updates, but there are still some cases where it could be experienced when the Switch CPU and GPU are put under too much pressure.
More time and people dedicated to this parts of development (so, bigger budget basically) should have been necessary to avoid these problems or fix it faster as we didn't had a plan B to put enough ressources on these aspects after the first issues had been encountered during development.
B/ The Driver's garage effect
At launch, Hot Lap Racing career mode suffered something we called the "Driver's garage syndrome" (from infamous Driver's tutorial from Reflection Software game on PS1 which no kid ever successfully passed -at least, I never succeeded myself when I was 11-).
Worst thing is that it's been an internal topic as it was a problem we really tried to avoid but failed to fix for release.
In career mode, Hot Lap Racing offer a tutorial designed in partnership with Feed Racing School to learn the basics before beginning to compete in the different championships.
Basically, players have two options: follow tutorial step by step, or choose to record a good lap time on a selected track to validate the whole tutorial.
Unfortunately, despite lot of tests, the lap time was too difficult to reach and the tutorial was a bit too long and complicated for most players.
Having a tutorial inspired by real lessons for aspiring drivers was maybe too hard for a game we wanted to be accessible to beginners.
Even if we fixed it later in updates, Hot Lap Racing reviews at release often mention this aspect as being a weak point of the game.
C/ Managing a team with external constraints
Even if many people worked on Hot Lap Racing, only a dozen could be on the
project at same time for big part of production as our team relied on some other side projects to fund this one.
It created some complicated situations where key people (and sometimes even people having leading roles) couldn't work on the game for a non-negligible amount of time which led to sometimes losing valuable inputs on some features or having some aspects of the game that were not implemented in the right order to be able to run efficient tests.
Overall, this had an impact on production and maybe we would have built the game differently if we knew from the beginning that rotation of the dev team would be more important than expected as it had been a crucial issue.
WE DON'T KNOW WHAT TO THINK ABOUT IT ...
A/ Music : Nobody agrees about it!
From the very beginning, we made choice of having an original soundtrack for the game. We didn't wanted to have something generic and we wanted also youtubers and streamers to not be annoyed with claims related to music. (and seeing Youtubers muting music in their videos had been really sad for us.)
The soundtrack is a mix of rock and electronic music which finally seems to be extremely divisive. Some people absolutely love it and point it as a strong point of the game, while some other thinks it's not good at all and is one of its weakest point (with very few in-between opinions).
We didn't expected this aspect of the game to have so many opposite opinions from critics and players and it had been a bit disturbing for the whole team to be honest. (And even more for our composer !)
B/ Low budget : problems and opportunities
It wouldn't surprise much people if I'd say that lack of money and time is nearly always the reasons a game project could fail and never deliver its promises even if you have best team in the world.
Having low budget created a lot of issues that had an impact at release of the game, and some had been mentionned in this post mortem but good part is that it also forced ourselves to be sometimes more creative which led to some unexpected decisions that had been beneficial for the game and we had to focus on fewer things, which was something good for delivering better quality.
C/ Being indie, but sometimes being compared to the big names.
Hot Lap Racing is an indie game. No doubt about it. Its budget and team size do not lie about this fact.
However, reviews and players had often compared Hot Lap Racing against bigger names of the racing market such as GRID, Gear Club and more...
In a way, we are proud that people consider our game as being a contender against these games with budgets for some of them 4 to 7 times more important than us (at least). But from the other side, we also felt sometimes that it wasn't good for us in terms of expectations as it was just impossible to have every features in Hot Lap Racing matching them.
Even if we tried hard to deliver the best experience to players with as most features as we could, it's impossible for us to be same quality on every aspects at release so being compared to them wasn't everytime in our favor.
That's also why we choose to have an aggressive updates plans after release, to give ourselves more time to improve Hot Lap Racing and slowly catch competition at most levels possible when it comes to features quality and content.
But the racing games market is not that huge and that's something we should have expected: that's why most other indie racing games are trying to focus on something very different to avoid being compared to the bigger games, unlike what we've done.
So having a realistic tone more or less forced us into the same category as the big racing games in the end, giving us the bittersweat sensation of being compared to them as we were proud, but it wasn't the best for Hot Lap Racing.
CONCLUSION
At the moment we write these lines, we still don't have precise informations about sales figures of the game. We know it hadn't been bad at all but not a very big success tho. Which is still something okay for us as our expectations weren't crazy as if you work in video game industry, you know current market state is quite bad.
We expect moderate sales which match our publisher expectations and we hope to be profitable after some time.
Also, the game is behaving quite well on Switch, but PC versions are nearly non-existent (Steam and Epic Games Store) as it seems to not be selling much despite our efforts in latest updates to add more PC specific features. But it is not surprising on such overcrowded distribution platforms.
Sure, we know Hot Lap Racing was not unanimously acclaimed, but we're very proud of it and it's also a good showcase for Zero Games Studios as we proved we were able to work on very heavy constraints and despite this deliver a solid game with solid quality features.
It has a good community of people enjoying it and lot of people seems to like that the game is delivering something different on its market.
And in the end, having so many positive feedbacks from the players is the reason why we're doing games and that's what counts the most for us.
Bonus : first Hot Lap Racing prototype also had Rally ! (we removed it as it was too expensive.)
And the first two official cars made for the game were AGS JH25 and Lamera Cup !