At the beginning of December, I took over as the lead developer of the indie racing game GeneRally. I’ve been a member of this game’s astonishingly dedicated community since its inception, back in 2002 when a tentative release of a beta version by original authors Hannu and Jukka Rabina, spawned a community that must have been beyond their wildest dreams.
GeneRally’s development stopped in 2003 and slowly, but surely, the community began to die. Since 2007, I’d been talking to Hannu about the possibility of taking over development of the project – but a lack of motivation for either of us to initiate the ‘hand-over’ meant that nothing much got done until December 2010.
It’s quite an exciting feeling to get the opportunity to lead the development on a game you’ve previously sunk untold hours of your time into… “finally,” you think, “I can fix those bugs and add those features I’d always wanted to see.” To an extent, that’s been true – but a lot of the past couple of months has been a learning process.
We made a new release of the game (v1.10) back in February and pushed out a bug-fix release last month, as well… but the development is ongoing. Along with my friend, Markku, we have been constantly implementing new features and fixes for GeneRally – attempting to make it compatible with modern operating systems and starting to bring it up to the visual/interaction standard that people expect from indie games these days. Our focus at the moment is mainly on rewriting some of the old, buggy features and improving the AI to make them a little less “gung-ho!”
If you find yourself with a free moment, do take a look at the game (which will run on Windows XP or later, or via WINE/Darwine) and let me know what you think could be improved, fixed or just generally updated (no pun intended)!
Amazing! Thank you James! Keep up the excellent work!
So glad to see someone has finally picked this game up. I too spent many hours playing with it over the years.
I look forward to checking out your new releases.
Thank you!!