Wash test number fourteen · Rally Mortis diary

Watercolour is a terrible medium for a car combat game, which is precisely why we wanted it.

Paint on wet paper does not stay where you put it. It runs, pools and dries with a hard edge you did not ask for. A car game wants the opposite: crisp silhouettes, readable roads, a clear idea of where the other car is so that you can hit it. For the last nine days we have been trying to have both.

Ink drawing of a clifftop mansion with a patch of colour wash, labelled wash test number 14 — The mansion on the cliff, wash test fourteen. The heading says “let it bleed”. The note in the corner says “too clean. more drips!” We kept both.

What went wrong, thirteen times

The first tests looked like a game with a paper filter on top, which is what they were. The paper sat over the picture like a sheet of tracing paper, the colour underneath stayed perfectly flat and the result felt cheap. Tests four to nine went too far the other way: so much bleeding and blotting that you could not tell the road from the verge, which in a racing game is a serious complaint.

Tests ten to thirteen were the arguments about where the paint goes. Does the sky get a wash? Do shadows? Does a car?

What fourteen does

The paper is in every frame. Its grain sits inside the colour, not on top of it, so dark areas look as if the pigment has settled into the dips.
Ink holds the shapes. Roads, kerbs and cars keep an ink line, so you can always read where you are going. The colour is allowed to wander; the ink is not.
Rain makes it run. In wet weather the washes bleed further and the sky drips. Lowmarsh, which is mostly water, is going to look extraordinary or illegible. We will find out which.
Crashes leave a stain. Damage does not vanish when the camera moves on. A wreck leaves a mark on the road for the rest of the race, so a lap round the promenade becomes a record of everything you did on the previous one.

Pencil underdrawing of the cover art with the colour half laid in — The cover painting, half finished: pencil underneath, colour coming in from the left. We pin these up as the target the engine has to hit.

The target

Below is where we want the game to end up: the key art for the project, finished this week. Wade and Vee on the cliff road, the house behind them, the dog in the back seat with an opinion. The engine is nowhere near this yet. But it is now pointing at it, which is the important part.

Vee Lark and Wade Kessler lean on a black sedan on a rain-soaked cliff road, a bulldog in the back seat, a mansion on the headland behind them — The key art. Rain, a cliff road, two heirs and a bulldog. The game will try to look like this; some days it will even manage.

Next: the man at the wheel. Wade Kessler, who has been driving for other people for twelve years and has never once, according to his late employer, said anything interesting.