A hook for the barges

Lowmarsh is mostly water with ideas above its station, and the barges moored below the Memorial Gardens are where those ideas end. You follow the hearse down the hill and out on to boats that roll. We wrote here that barges roll. We underestimated how often players would discover it the hard way.

So yesterday went on mercy, of a carefully rationed kind.

A hook on Lenient

On Lenient, the barges now wait for you. If you jump and land badly, a grapple swings out and hooks the car back ashore, and a line at the top of the screen tells you it has happened, so that nobody thinks they have done something clever. Standard and Ruthless keep their canal exactly as cold as before.

We tested it by playing the fight as badly as we know how, and then a little worse. Lenient players reach the end of it now. They do not always enjoy the trip, which is as the will intended.

Mind, barges roll

Pages in the air

Chapter one hides more than it shows: a garage left open, a jetty that takes a landing, a pool deck you were not supposed to drive on. Yesterday the hidden things got a little help.

• When you pass within a short drive of a hidden corner you have not found yet, a loose page flutters in the air above it. Nothing more. It does not point, and it does not explain.
• Every shortcut’s sign now carries a small painted arrow, so a gap in the hedge reads as an invitation rather than a mistake.
• Trials pay only for what you improve on your own best, so driving the same easy lap forty times for the reward has stopped being a career.

Stuck, three times

Every racing game has one corner where cars get stuck. Ours was the edge of a Lowmarsh canal, where a car could be put back on the road, bump the kerb, slide back in and be put back again, like a dog that has found a puddle it likes.

Now, if a car gets stuck at the same spot a third time running, it is put back a little further along the road instead. The canal edge has gone from a loop to a minor inconvenience. Rivals benefit too, which means they no longer wait for you there, which some testers missed.

The canal misses them already.

Smaller things

The game no longer sits on an endless loading screen, or starts a race you cannot see, if the computer’s graphics stumble for a moment. It recovers and carries on, which is more than can be said for some of us.

We also built the window that appears when the road goes north: the place that explains, plainly and without a single number, how to carry on past chapter one. Nothing is asked of you when you start the game. If money comes up, the answer is short: one purchase, set at launch. The window is still rough, and we are not happy with every word of it yet.

All of it is pre-alpha. The barges still roll, the canal is still there, and Prudence, we should add, has not become any kinder. But the road through Lowmarsh is now a fight rather than a swimming lesson, and that felt like a fair day’s work.