The Question

Is it an arcade game or a serious esports game? Or is it a sandbox game? Is it a top-down racing game or not? Is it about multiplayer or single-player? Is it about racing or is it like Fall Guys with cars? What’s the deal with other mods like sumo, tag, capture-the-flag and soccer? Is it a Rocket League clone? With missiles, is it a battle racer after all? Why are there so many settings to tune? What exactly is the main focus?

These are all valid questions asked by people who learn about Turbo Sliders Unlimited and get exposed to its numerous features. Before answering the questions, let’s tell a bit more about the game and what makes it different from most other games!

The usual way

The normal way to make games is to focus on one game mode and polish that as much as possible. The UI, settings and everything else is as simple as possible so that players are not confused by anything. In the case of multiplayer games, servers are usually hosted by game developers. Levels, rules and settings are carefully tuned so that players always get the uniform experience. In the era of F2P gaming, even non-F2P games often aim to build a metagame and ecosystem hosted and strictly controlled by the game makers.

All this is of course perfectly sensible. However, you are free to call us insane, but what Turbo Sliders Unlimited is doing is something different!

The TSU way

The main design principle of Turbo Sliders Unlimited is embedded in its name: it aims to be UNLIMITED. What that means in practice is that as much as possible is freely tunable by players, whether it makes sense or not. Players can make and share their own levels, drastically modify physics and game rules, tune cameras, and modify many other settings. And even that is not all - the idea is to provide an open sandbox platform where anybody can come up with completely new game modes or even create their own metagame. Anyone can host games with their own rules, and there is extensive support for server-side scripting. It is possible for players to create their own statistics or ranking services for their dedicated servers or even create networks of dedicated servers. It remains to be seen what the player community can and will do but the aim is to support players with these endeavors as much as possible. The idea is to help players find the fun by themselves, not to spoon-feed the one and only way.

Most players of course just want to play the game and not have to worry about such complexities. To get instant single-player action, you can simply play campaigns or launch a Quick Game against AI players. With the matchmaking system, it is easy to pick which server to join when playing online. 

TSU Discord server is the main place to find other players and plan upcoming events. Ultimately, it is players who will decide which game modes become the most popular ones.

Release plan

Turbo Sliders Unlimited is a passion project. The goal is to make a game the developers want to play, not to optimize everything for money. More about that in The Origin of Turbo Sliders Unlimited.

With most games, a big percentage of the sales comes right after the release and the marketing focuses on that. TSU has no pressure to sell a lot in the beginning —  or at any point for that matter. The goal is to make a great open platform that can organically grow over time.

TSU Closed Beta ran successfully for months before the Early Access release on Steam. Most of the core features were there from day one: multiplayer, level editor, vehicle editor, content sharing, lap leaderboards, recordings etc. During the Early Access period, a massive amount of new features were added, including multiple new game modes, AI players, single player campaigns. Steam ranking was Very Positive (92.5% while writing this).

The full release does not mean it's the the end of the development. Development is planned to continue as long as there are new fun gameplay ideas to be added and players to play them.

There is close communication between players and developers. Players can give their suggestions and ideas and directly affect which features will get implemented. The main place to be for this is the TSU Discord server. 

The Answer

But back to the original questions!

So, is it an arcade game or a serious esports game or a sandbox? Is it a top-down racing game or not? Is it about multiplayer or single-player or something else? Is it about racing or what’s the deal with all the game modes? Why are there so many settings to tune? What exactly is the main focus?

Yes. 

It is Turbo Sliders Unlimited. You decide!