January 2014 is upon us, and we’re closing in on the launch of our Kickstarter campaign (just a few bits and bobs to tidy up between now and then) – we’ll be making another blog post with the final details soon. But, for today, we’re offering you an opportunity to watch Kimmo at work. His work on the cars and objects for the game has been superb, and we wanted to show you a glimpse of his process as he recreates a classic GeneRally car for the Sequel: the Formula.

Some of you will notice that the resulting car is only 200 polies (excluding the wheels, of course) – this is a direct response to the feedback we received from you, the community, regarding the speculative 400 poly limit back in March 2013. We’re keen to ensure that we strike an effective balance between detail and GeneRally’s unique style – and we think we’ve hit the nail on the head here!

Here’s what Kimmo has to say about the cars in the Sequel:

Cars are the stars in GeneRally. So when designing the limits and parameters for the Sequel we have had to keep in mind what makes a GR car a GR car. For me, personally, that means simple yet recognisable appearance, simple colours, fun handling and spherical wheels. The last one is the most important as it really defines a GeneRally car. The exterior level of detail, or polycount, is being increased (as many of you know). The original proposition of 400 polygons raised emotions and this shows how important the cars’ looks are to the community. We’ve since then experimented with different limits ranging from 100 to 400 and decided to cut back from 400 polygons (which really was unnecessarily high) to 200 and we now feel it’s a good limit for the goals we have in mind. We want to increase the recognisability and detail in the cars while still keeping them quite simple-looking. We also want to enable all cars to have a floor and wheel wells, so that they can be happily flipped over/rolled, without going invisible. At the moment cars use a system similar to the original GeneRally’s: you can assign a material for each polygon that defines it’s color, shininess and other properties. Texturing is still under consideration, but I personally fear that enabling detailed liveries and decals might take a too long step away from being a GR car, and increase the complexity of creating cars significantly – this is one of the ideas we’ll be gathering feedback on in the weeks and months following Kickstarter.

And, without further ado, the main event:

Stay tuned to the developer blog for more updates throughout January, and beyond. Also consider following us on social media: Twitter, Facebook and Google+!