From the creative mind of Bryan Blackford and his startup company Speedway Labs is a new oval racing title is due to go live on Steam next month after months of development, testing and promotion through his social media accounts.
Speedway Ringer is the first planned platform racer from Blackford, a top-down platform racing game which was takes inspiration from American Stock Car oval racing series such as NASCAR. The title utilizes the Unreal Engine. Blackford is also working on another title called “Northern Speedways”.
On the Speedway Ringer Steam page, there are some further details about what is included in the game. The initial launch will feature five short tracks, inspired by real-world tracks in the United States. There are more tracks of different types in development as well.
“In addition to the standard tracks, the game will also feature special event tracks throughout the year that provide unique challenges,” states the Steam description. The Speedway Labs Discord has further discussion and development ideas and is open for anyone to join.
This title will also include features such as tire wear, damage and pit stops, which sounds similar to what Circuit Superstars offers in their title. There will be some customization in being able to choose between submitted and included paint schemes, and online multiplayer is the main premise of the racing that players will take part in.
Since it does seem to be heavily focused on the online racing aspect with no mentions of any offline races besides the test, that could be the reasons for the clean lap testing protocols seen in the promotional footage and images on the webpage.
Blackford is one of the original handful of drivers that competed in iRacing‘s eNASCAR Series when it started up in 2010. He raced full-time in the series until 2017. He still races on the iRacing platform from time to time, competing in the eNASCAR Contender iRacing Series in 2019 as well as other oval community events over the last few years.
Blackford has also hosted what’s known as the Hard To Drive 300, a special event for the oval side of the iRacing community to take part in that utilizes the older, more skilled cars on the service such as the 2012 NASCAR COT at tracks that can be considered hard to drive like Atlanta, Homestead-Miami and Darlington.
An exact date is still not known at this time, but Blackford tweeted earlier on Friday (10th March) that it would be live next month after just listing it on Steam at the end of January. What do you think about this upcoming indie title? Let us know in the comments below!
