The Question

Is it an arcade game or a serious esports game? Is it a top-down racing game or not? Is it about multiplayer or hotlapping or something else? Is it about racing or is it like Fall Guys with cars - and what’s the deal with other mods like sumo and soccer? Is it going to be a Rocket League clone 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 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 goal is to provide an open 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 an extensive support for server-side scripting. In theory, it would be 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 them 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. With the matchmaking system, it is easy to pick which server to join when playing online. Ultimately, it is players who will decide which game modes become the most popular ones. The weakness of the extremely open approach might be that especially in the beginning, when there are not lots of players yet hosting games, the first-time experience can be a bit random. If that becomes a problem, there might be need to host and maintain some developer-owned servers, too.

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. Marketing will be modest and no one expects the initial sales to be big. The goal is to make a great open platform that can organically grow over time.

TSU Closed Beta has been successfully running for months already, and TSU is going to be initially released on Steam as an Early Access version. Most of the core features will be there from day 1: multiplayer, level editor, vehicle editor, content sharing, lap leaderboards, recordings etc. The main missing features are the single-player campaign, more polished UI, and many new game modes players can still help invent. The full release date is not decided yet, and the development is not supposed to end at version 1.0 anyway. It 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. This is already happening on the TSU Discord server.

Whether the game will be released on other platforms is still open. Everything is possible, but because of the open nature of the game, it might require making a more limited version, possibly focusing on only a certain game mode.

The Answer

But back to the original questions!

So, is it an arcade game or a serious esports game? Is it a top-down racing game or not? Is it about multiplayer or hotlapping or something else? Is it about racing or is it like Fall Guys with cars - and what’s the deal with other mods like sumo and soccer? Is it going to be a Rocket League clone after all? Why are there so many settings to tune? What exactly is the main focus?

Yes.

It is Turbo Sliders Unlimited. You decide!