Ink on the dashboard
The interface of Rally Mortis is a solicitor's desk: paper, ink, wax and a clock. On designing a display you can read at speed, the menu in a dead man's study and the settings that let you choose black ink instead of red.
A racing game asks a lot of your eyes. Where is the road, where are the rivals, how long is left, what am I meant to be doing? We wanted all of that on screen without a single chrome speedometer, because in 1975 Valmora nobody would have trusted one.
The study
The game opens in Cornelius Vane’s study. Rain on the tall windows, a fire, a portrait of the deceased over the mantelpiece and Probate asleep on the rug. You choose your race from his desk. His portrait watches you do it. We tried a version where the eyes followed the cursor and took it out the same afternoon.
Paper on the windscreen
In a race, the display is made of paper. The clock is a card. Your goals are a note pinned to the corner. The noise meter is a register filled in by hand, and when a codicil arrives it lands like a fresh page of the will. Everything is in ink on cream paper, so it sits inside the watercolour world rather than floating above it.
The hard part was reading it at speed. Paper is pretty and paper is pale, and pale cards on a sunny promenade disappear. So every card got a darker edge, the numbers got larger, and the most important one, time remaining, turns red and says so out loud when it gets short.
Choices
We would like everyone who wants to play this to be able to, so the settings are in from the start rather than bolted on at the end:
- Blood: watercolour red, or black ink. The game is for adults, but not everyone wants the red. Black ink is drier, and the settings note adds that it also keeps every limb attached.
- Screen shake and flashes can both be reduced. The game says so before it starts.
- Subtitles for every line, at a size you choose.
- Terms. Lenient, Standard or Ruthless: more time and softer hits, the game as the deceased intended, or less time, harder hits and a Ruthless mark on every medal.
- Controls. Two keys per action, pads with the usual layout and, for touch screens, automatic gas and tilt to steer.
The wax seal
Every important moment ends with a wax seal: a will signed, a race settled, a chapter closed. It is a small animation, about a second long, and we have spent longer on it than on some entire streets. It is worth it. Nothing says final like hot wax.