“It’s such an incredibly inspiring moment to see in cinema. I remember seeing it for the first time,” Fuse Games’ CEO Matt Webster recalled to Traxion.
“It just felt fresh, new, exciting, energetic, scary and fast. So of course we wanted to start there.”
For fans of the original Star Wars Racer games, returning to podracing in a game with modern visuals is an exciting prospect. It isn’t the primary focus in Galactic Racer, however, and is instead limited to specific story campaign events and curated arcade events.
Grid sizes are also reduced to six in single-player and eight in multiplayer in podracing events. Webster reveals this was a deliberate decision to accommodate their “size, complexity and speed.”
“They’re on another level,” he said. “They require their own space because they just go so quickly. From a player perspective, they demand more things from you.
“For us, from an engineering perspective, being able to go at that speed, at that size with different racers on the track demands different requirements from a technical perspective. The creative solution was to lean into the right number of racers that we need on this racetrack.”
“These things are the size of buses,” Creative Director Kieran Crimmins added.
“This number felt like the exact right amount. You still get loads of great interactions and great gameplay moments, but it didn’t feel like it was too much and you have to dodge buses all the time.”
Expanded universe
Podracing isn’t the only vehicle category, however. Galactic Racer sees you pilot landspeeders, speeder bikes and skim speeders, each with unique speed and handling attributes.
“We always knew podracers were going to be the fastest vehicles in the game,” said Crimmins.
“They’re going to be the most exciting and difficult experience. So we always knew where the high end was. But the question is, what’s the low end? There’s a variety of experiences in most racing games. It was the obvious expansion of the space.”
Outside of podracing, the multi-class nature of other events meant that balancing each vehicle type was no easy feat.
“The envelope of speed has to be somewhat similar for each one,” Crimmins explained. Some vehicles, for example, accelerate faster but sacrifice more speed when cornering.
“It’s a delicate balance to make sure they’ve all got their own personality, but make sense together,” he said.
With each class designed to take different racing lines, the epic spectacle makes you “feel like you are playing a scene from a Star Wars movie.”
Naturally incorporating podracing into Galactic Racer’s narrative and timeline proved to be another challenge. Set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens during the fall of the Empire, an original story sees you play as Shade, a mysterious rookie pilot recruited to defeat the reigning champion Kestar Bool in a multi-vehicle racing tournament known as Galactic League.
Podracing is referenced throughout, with an older Sebulba (Anakin’s arch racing rival in The Phantom Menace,) making cameo appearances as a feared veteran. The villainous Dug plays a vital role later in the campaign.
“As Pax says in the prologue, podraces might be the ultimate form of racing, but hardly anyone in the galaxy can fly them,” Webster explained.
“Racing as an activity and sport in Star Wars has been through various mediums, but we wanted to broaden that out and bring together that sports component. That led to some creative opportunities for us to do more than the expected.”
This enabled the team to create the Skim Speeder, an all-new vehicle designed specifically for Galactic Racer that can tilt on its side with its special Knife Edge ability when navigating sharp turns. When designing it, the developer took inspiration from starfighters in flying scenes from the films.
“You see them doing great banking turns. They’ve always got interesting articulated parts,” Crimmins explained. “They feel like these fantastic planes. We wanted a version of that you could race with the other vehicles.”
Its unique vehicle physics were inspired by air racing, making them feel like “low-flying planes.”
“They’re a very elegant flying vehicle that takes long sweeping lines and then takes a long time to build up speed and gain momentum,” Crimmins added.
“It was too good an opportunity for us not to grasp with both hands”
“We’re excited about the richness of the vehicles we’ve got,” said Webster.
“We knew we couldn’t create a Star Wars racing game without podracing. But these vehicles expanded the opportunity for play, competition and immersion beyond those incredible vehicles everyone knows and loves.”
With multiple vehicle categories, an extensive upgrade system and an original story campaign with a roguelite structure that “brings consequence back into racing,” Galactic Racer is more than a modern remake of the original Star Wars Racer – and it’s all the better for it.
“I’m sure there are a lot of people that say ‘why don’t you just remake the other one?’” said Webster.
“If we had done that, it would feel like a missed opportunity for us to do something fresh, new and exciting in a Star Wars racing experience. It was too good an opportunity for us not to grasp with both hands.”
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