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TURBONEON is an action-packed multiplayer racing game, set in a futuristic, 80’s themed neon world. Use your ship, equipped with a powerful tether beam, to turn tight corners and pull other racers behind you as you race for glory.

Post news Report RSS TURBONEON: Alpha Release

The team behind TURBONEON, Studio DEEM Engine discusses the changes coming to the first public alpha release of the game.

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The alpha version of TURBONEON brings with it an exciting new ‘lock-on tether’ mechanic, which allows racers to boost off of ships ahead of them. Players who are being locked onto can strafe left and right to evade enemy tether beams.

Another large addition to the alpha version is an improved tutorial/readyup area. In this area, players may plug in more controllers and complete an infinitely looping tutorial to get used to the controls. When all players hit ‘select’, players are taken to the track selected before the tutorial.

This alpha version also comes with a few tweaks to tethering (players should experience a boost in speed when exiting a tether turn); an updated soundtrack (a faster song, a fade-in/fade-out for the tether beam, and more sound effects); and a suite of new UI elements, along with a preliminary menu for track selection.

Many of these changes were inspired by feedback we’d received at previous playtesting sessions - for example, some players felt that they felt that their ship was experiencing a slowdown while exiting turns, so we added a boost that the player receives that is relative to how long they keep the tether held down. Other changes, like those to the tutorial/readyup, are just to bring the project in line with what we’d imagined.

We’ve received consistent feedback in the past that our game is reminiscent of the PS1 and PS2 series Jet Moto, which features a somewhat similar tethering turning mechanic. The addition of the “lock-on tether” mechanic is intended to serve as a differentiator from that series - now the tether is used not just to interact with the environment, but to interact with other racers and boost past them.

From a less publicly visible perspective, our team has created a fairly well-featured level editor, through which we have 2-3 more levels coming down the pipeline and going through debugging. We hope that these new levels will add variety to the game. With these new levels, we are exploring branching paths, more verticality, moving tether points, a variety of exciting obstacles and even more to increase the depth of the game.

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