Roadclub: League Racing

From traffic fatalities to local police forces, street racing is extremely dangerous. It is also a way of life for many. Needing a place to go, street racers founded a club. A place where some of the best drivers in the world compete and race among themselves. A culture where only their own rules apply. This is Roadclub.

Without the spotlight and backing of multi-billion dollar car corporations, these racers tear up long forgotten tracks with the lust of competition and victory pumping through their blood, with the ultimate goal: to be the best among their peers.

And now you're finally a member, ready to show them what you’re made of.So what’s especially awesome about Roadclub?

• Begin your journey towards glory among your peers in the division-based Roadclub Career mode where you can get promoted or relegated depending on your performance and finally face off against the reigning Roadclub Master and take his title.
  
• Meet evolving career opponents. The next time you bump into a club member they’ll have an upgraded ride or perhaps even bought a new even better car!
  
• Invite a friend to play old-school splitscreen multiplayer.
  
• Prove yourself globally or among your friends on the Steam Leaderboards.
  
• Feel your car’s personalities like seldom seen in a 2D top-down game with amazingly detailed car handling. Everything from tyre grip to drivetrain, transmission, engine, weight distribution and air resistance are modeled which makes every race and car feel unique and a lot harder to fully master.
  
• Several difficulty levels takes Roadclub from a stroll in the park to a full-on brutal experience. If you’re not used to this kind of game, even the lowest setting might be a challenge.
  
• Collect and upgrade cars in your ever-growing garage.
  
• Race well and rise in rank to unlock new cars for sale.
  
• Challenge yourself to claim meaningful Steam Achievements.
  
• Rock to the racing beat - and calm down to the breezier menu tracks by Zircon.

A brief Roadclub historyRoadclub is an insane passion project made mostly by two guys (Benny and Ralf) with some help from our friends. Development time spans several thousands of hours during about seven relatively active development years in our spare time since we started in 2004 when we met at college - and all the way to now, in 2017.


The game runs on our own ol’ SolidEngine based on DirectX9 that we made way back when the real engines weren’t free. This has been an awesome learning experience but sadly also means constraints in what we can do without changing or massively updating the engine (release platforms, multiplayer..). Roadclub has went through many iterations over the years and the original version was finally on sale in late 2008. Since we were greenlit on Steam in 2015 we spent these past two years upgrading the game to the state it’s in now. If you decide to support our crazy endeavor we'll be eternally grateful and maybe we'll be able to start a new, perhaps a bit smaller, project in the future. So thanks so much for your support, we really appreciate it!Steam version upgradesThis is the remastered Steam version of the original Roadclub released in 2008. We've improved it in tons of ways since we were greenlit in 2015. Here are the most important improvements:

• Added Steam features like achievements, cloud save and leaderboards.
  
• Added 2-player local splitscreen multiplayer. Race your best friend or nemesis to show them who’s boss!
  
• HD resolution and widescreen support (the original was hardcoded to 800x600). It now also has experimental support for ultra-wide 21:9 screens for larger individual splitscreen views!
  
• Full controller support, using both DirectInput and XInput which means that the game supports older USB gamepads, sticks and wheels, not just modern Xbox controllers like most games today.
  
• Remade most of the user interface. We’ve redesigned every screen to make the game easier to use. We know there’s even more to be done here but it’s a good foundation.
  
• Remade tons of art assets and increased texture and track resolutions.
  
• Put AI drivers through some training and gave them some new shopping tactics between races.
  
• Improved the car physics in several ways balancing speed and handling to make it the most fun to play.
  
• Added new tracks and removed old ones that didn't make the cut. We now value quality and diversity over quantity. More tracks can always be added later.
  
• Remade all the cars (some art assets are the same). Even more to come.
  
• Rewrote huge parts of the almost 100k lines of code to be more maintainable and less prone to bugs.
  
• Squashed a ton of those pesky insects (bugs) after lots of testing by a lot more people than the last release (which was mostly ourselves).

The futureThere's a few things we'd love to do as updates if the game is successful. For example:

• Splitscreen division racing. We’d like to expand the splitscreen mode to a multi-part challenge where you’d race a series of races from a division of the main career league counting points between them and finally announce a winner after the series has been completed.
  
• We'd like to make our own editors available to let you make tracks, leagues, cars and opponents and share with the community in a Roadclub Workshop. We can't promise it will be included in the final game yet. If you show your enough support for this we might go for it!
  
• More achievements (there are just 3 at launch to test the ability, which we know is way too few for a game like this).
  
• More tracks
  
• More cars
  
• More something else you’d like to see?

A little note about feedbackMy day job (Benny) is working as a frontend developer where listening to user feedback is key to designing successful user interfaces and getting happy users. We are just as serious about this here and will listen to all your thoughts and take them to heart. Still, as any good designer knows, the final decision on what changes needs to lie with the designer or you’ll end up with a mess created by a mass of wills. That said, you’re doomed if you aren’t listening to your players and incorporating their comments if possible. So let us hear it! The good, bad and ugly - we want it all to make Roadclub the best game possible for you and frankly ourselves, you gotta love your creation or noone else will!

Thank you for playing Roadclub!