GRITS Racing (itch)

Strap on your dandy Tesla Shield and hop in your “Billy Bub” jalopy!

GRITS Racing is an 8-player party game featuring chaotic party mechanics and cars that steer and crash similar to a real car.  This is the most realistic TD/2D racer ever... except that we then smashed it up into a bizarre party game to appeal to more than just racing fans.  We provide a physics playground with sim-like cars, minimal rules (at the start), and you decide what to do with it.  Good luck keeping your wheels on!

Whaaaaat???

Old school gets a new-school makeover with more damageable physics objects than you can shake a two-dimensional polygon at.  And, oh, the skids marks!  Did we mention the oddly-satisfying skid marks that dirty up the track like never before?  And the dirt doesn't end there.  With debris everywhere from lost wheels, broken cars, various track objects, and up to 8 players on one screen generally making a mess of it all, just getting to the finish line can be a friend-testing brawl of gasoline-fueled tenacity.

Welcome to the petrolpunk world of Globetrotter Racing where it's 1975, The Great War was the only great war, microelectronics do not exist... probably because no one cared about going small after Nikola Tesla and his descendants learned to harness the power of lightning—to put it simply—and invented the Tesla Shield™ for use in automotive safety and generalized pedestrian protection (GPP).

GRITS Racing is a game for the whole family and if somebody isn't laughing, giggling, snickering, or snorting most of the game... we aren't doing our job correctly.  We get it, not all players will choose to race—so we've given them other ways to be part of the environment (for better or for worse).

When

Free alpha demo is out now.  Early-access alpha is also out now.

Where

itch.io and Steam and any console we can wreck these cars on.

Why

Because making up and nixing rules on the playground is really fun.

Who

Brought to you by the cow-skull boneheads at Muddy Desert.

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Features

Realistic 2D car physics:

• These 2D cars actually steer via the wheels!  (Unlike nearly all games in this category, which just pivot their cars on center.)  You may not see a difference, but take a car for a spin and you will feel it.  Quite possibly more realistic than a multiplayer couch game needs to be.
• Car body and wheels modeled as individual physics objects (with proprietary physics code)
• 4-wheel drive
• 4-wheel steering (rear steering tapers off at speed)
• 4-speed transmission (plus reverse) with a torque curve
• 430 ft-lbs (582 N-m) of engine torque (subject to change)
• Hand brake on the rear wheels
• Breakable wheel fasteners!  (What is it like to drive on 3 wheels and 1 stub axle?  How about 1 wheel and 3 stub axles?)

Smashing 2D barrier physics:

• Several barrier types with different friction coefficients and bounciness
• Not all barriers are nailed down!
• Barriers take damage and show it

Gripping 2D surface physics:

• Several surface types with different traction coefficients and drag coefficients
• Dry, wet, and oily variants
• Oil slicks appear organically when and where cars are broken apart during the race
• Oil doesn't artificially wipe you out but only makes whichever tires touch it slick (the wipe outs are up to you)
• Oil slickness on tires tapers off over distance
• Skid and tire marks vary in width by direction and vary in color by surface

Mayhem Model 1-A:

• Pancake batter!!!*
• Pit stops to apply more pancake batter and replace missing wheels
• Cars can be broken apart when abandoned
• 4 cars per race (run to your trucks to launch your next car)
• Tesla Shields™ (can't have drivers being hit and injured as they run for their next car, can we?)
• Tesla Shields™ (worth mentioning again because the counter force can be very bad for the car that hits one)
• Le Mans starts (well, more of a cute feature than chaos-making)
• Not all barriers are nailed down!  (wait, we said that already)
• Up to 8 players on one screen
• Bubba Prizes!
• Save and share game photos showing off the mess ya'll made of the track

Mayhem Model 1-B:

• 4 AI cars (features to be announced when built)

Mayhem Model 2:

• Wacky Wodifiers that ask “lucky losers” to periodically change the rules of the playground, like:  • Tractor wheels • Far-out fat tires • Dualies • Area 51 Tesla Shields • Reverse-polarity Tesla Shields • Disposable cars • Dragster chutes • and many more to come
• Leader Lamifiers that force “on-fire” players to add a rule to make things more difficult for the race leader, like:  • Leader trikes • Finish-line showboating required • and more to come
• See devlog: Announcing the Beginnings of Mayhem Model 2!

Prison Dodgecar minigame:

• Tesla Shields™ installed on the car instead of the driver
• Like bumper cars meets billiards

Hockey minigame (Sansstíkdisco in some countries):

• Tesla Magnets™ for run-n-gun puck control

* The pancake batter story.  Many years ago a racer was having trouble with the wheel lug nuts staying tight.  So, in desperation, he was looking about his pit area for a new idea to fix it when he spied his leftover pancake batter from breakfast.  He thought “It couldn't possibly be any worse, could it?”  Well, actually, yes, it was worse.  Much worse.  But the crowd loved the results and the rest is lost in history.  No one remembers for sure who this racer was but legend has it he was called Juan Tabo.  Official records proving the existence of Jaun Tabo have yet to be found but this hasn't stopped governments from naming libraries and schools in his honor.

The sport, then known as Wiggle Wheel Wacing, languished in the backwoods of the Southern United States for years before Gilded-Age billionaire, Billy Bub Worcestershire, bought the rights to it and turned it into the mid-budget international sport known as Globetrotter Racing.  Mr. Worcestershire had previously made his fortune with the invention and popularization of deep-fried grits biscuits and, as he stated it, “I understand food batter and believe in the future of all its lucrative properties.”  Deep-fried grits also became the sport's official snack food.  When the Tesla's later invented the personal plasma energy shield (PPES), or Tesla Shield™, Mr. Worcestershire incorporated these shields into Globetrotter Racing and this variant, coincidently, became known as GRITS (Globetrotter Racing Incorporated, á la Tesla Shields).

Early access Steam key included with itch.io purchase.

NOTE: We plan to gradually raise the price as we ship new content and features.

This Steam Early Access game is currently not a finished game and may or may not change significantly over the course of development. To learn more about Steam Early Access, please visit http://store.steampowered.com/earlyaccessfaq

Install instructions

Unzip and run the executable.  Look for how-to-play instructions in the Options menu.   Look for other details in the readme or the quick reference files.

NOTE: This is an unfinished game and some major features do not work yet.  For example, the AI cars don't drive yet, so they are just curious obstacles on the track for now.

We've had unconfirmed reports that the Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable is required to run this game.  You can get it here.

Most gamepads are supported: Supported Gamepads.

The free demo version is limited to 2 tracks repeated twice in a 4-race championship.  Demo races are limited to 15 laps per race.  The demo also limits the minigames to 1 minute.  Local multiplayer is not limited in the demo.