Port Saffron, summer 1975 · Rally Mortis diary

Every story needs a first place, and ours needed a place worth ruining. Port Saffron is a resort on the south coast of Valmora: palm trees, ice cream, a long promenade, pastel hotels and a beach that is mostly sun loungers. It is very pleasant. It will not stay that way.

A wet seafront promenade at sunset, a wreath on a bench and a car parked by the railings — The Port Saffron promenade at sunset, as it appears while the race loads. A wreath on a bench: somebody has been here before you.

Building a town to break

A town in a car combat game has two jobs. It has to be readable at speed, so that you always know where the road goes, and it has to be full of things that will break in an entertaining way when you get it wrong.

We started with the roads only: a grey model of the promenade, the beach, four streets running uphill and a plaza at the top. No art at all. We drove it for a week. Streets that were never used got cut; streets where people kept crashing into each other got wider, because that is where the fun was.

Then came the furniture. Bollards, benches, bins, kiosks, ice-cream stalls, deckchairs, the bandstand. Every piece is something to hit, and every piece has a line on the statement at the end of the race:

Sun loungers: 41. Sun: unaffected.

Landmarks

Each town gets a few landmarks you can recognise from anywhere in it, so you can steer by them and, in due course, drive through them. Port Saffron has a lighthouse on the rocks at one end and the Halfmast Hotel at the other.

Ink drawing of the Halfmast Hotel, its flags at half mast — The Halfmast Hotel. Flags always at half mast; the note in the margin explains that someone always just died.

Port Saffron lighthouse on the rocks — The Port Saffron lighthouse. It is the one thing in town nobody is allowed to drive into. Yet.

First drive

Here is the promenade in the engine this week. It is early: the textures are placeholders in places, the townsfolk are only half there and the sea is a little too tidy. But it already feels like a place you are about to get into trouble in.

Pre-alpha footage

Down the promenade with the family in the mirrors. Pre-alpha footage: the hotels are still being furnished.

A black car with a spiked bumper drifts down a sunny seaside boulevard while pedestrians dive out of the way — The town as we want it to feel: a sunny boulevard, a black car going sideways and a great many people suddenly remembering appointments elsewhere.

Next week we put real people in front of it for the first time. We are told this is called a playtest. We are told it is good for us.