In May, the month before I got married, I became aware that I was running out of time. The wedding was fast approaching!

Red Forest #1 Screenshot

Play Red Forest here:

Instead of writing an entire game from scratch, I pulled out an old robot-football prototype I wrote from around 2003 and began porting it to Unity.  FMC, or, Full Metal Conflict, as it was called, was always fun to work on. This was no exception in Unity either, and within a few hours I had wonderfully floaty hover vehicles shooting at each other, but it lacked something.

So, I turned it into a racer. I was never interested in Football, even when there were lasers involved!

May’s version of Red Forest involved a single, terrain based track and it was brilliant fun. I would say it stuck to my 16 hour dev rule but this one didn’t, I spent most of the month on it, getting the AI to respond and react realistically, and generally applying the adrenaline pumping speed I envisioned.

It worked.

Now, seeing as I want Sturdy Games to be about telling a good story as much as it is about games, I had to find a suitable story! Cue my cousin Brian’s input:

Once every couple of years, a great racing tournament is held in the Red Forest.

People from all over flock to enter, voluntarily, coerced, or as slaves.

The prize is enough money for the entrant’s community to escape poverty forever. Or enough for the racer and their family, or their master, to live like royalty for the rest of their days.

The poor represent their families, their friends. The slaves represent their wealthy owners.

Then there’s me. The reason this place is called the Red Forest.

I don’t race representing anybody. I don’t care too much for the money.

I just like to watch the world burn….