Five months ago this diary started with a hearse sketched in a notebook and a sentence we could not take back. Today the game has a website, a mailing list and a trailer, and we are a little nervous about all three.

Watch the pre-alpha trailer · 1:24

What pre-alpha means

Rally Mortis is in pre-alpha. That means the game exists and can be played from the first scene to the end of chapter one, but almost nothing in it is final. Textures, cars, voices, music, the interface, the balance of every race: all of it is still moving. Some of what is in the trailer will look different when you play it. Some of it will not be there at all, and something better will be in its place. That is the deal, and it is why every clip on this site carries a little pre-alpha label.

How we cut the trailer

We gave ourselves a simple rule: show the game, not a promise. Every shot of driving in the trailer is captured in the engine from the pre-alpha build, at full speed or slowed down, never repainted. The story moments come from the painted panels that play between races.

Then we cut it to the main title. At a hundred and one beats a minute it is a procession, not a sprint, so the trailer opens slowly, with the house, the family and the will, and only starts to run when the money is mentioned. After that, almost every cut lands on a beat. Towards the end the cuts come twice a beat, which is about as fast as a funeral march can be persuaded to go.

We wrote no new dialogue for the trailer. Every spoken word in it is from the game: the will, Vee, Pell and the deceased himself.

The prize is my urn. Inside, instructions. Do make some noise. I shall be listening.

What happens next

• Chapter one goes on being polished until it is something we would be happy for you to play. Then it goes to testers.
• Chapter two, Verdance and the twins, is being built.
• This diary carries on. More sketches, more wrong turns, more about the family.

If you would like to know when there is something to play, leave an address on the front page. One email when chapter one opens, perhaps one more when the whole road does. No newsletter about our feelings.

Rally Mortis is a game for adults, with cartoon violence, crashes and watercolour blood. Everyone in it is fictional, including the country. Pre-alpha: everything here is work in progress.

Thank you for reading this far. The deceased would have been mildly irritated. We are delighted.

On Monday evening, for the first time, somebody in the studio sat down and played chapter one from start to finish without us having to restart anything, skip anything or explain anything over their shoulder. It took a little over an hour. Nobody spoke. Then everyone spoke at once.

The Noise Clause

Chapter one is called The Noise Clause. It covers the first stretch of the Long Spine, from Port Saffron to Lowmarsh, and it runs like this:

1. The Reading. The prologue. The family, the gramophone, the will, and a race to the cars.
2. Reading of the Will: Saffron Promenade. The first race proper. Checkpoints, rivals, a great many sun loungers.
3. Heirloom: The Gilded Mascot. The deceased had a golden mascot modelled on himself. Hold it for ninety seconds in total, on the town hall steps, while everyone else tries to take it off you.
4. The Long Spine: Coast Road. Night, rain, lorries and three and a half minutes to reach the Lowmarsh flood gates before they close.
5. Reading of the Will: Lowmarsh Canals. The water rises. The roofs become roads.
6. Rescue. Two and a half minutes to pull Juno Marsh’s tow truck out of a flooded garage.
7. Final Viewing: Prudence. The eldest daughter, the hearse, the memorial gardens and the wreaths.

The story so far

Between chapters, the story so far is read into the record by Mr Twelvetrees, who has never been asked for his opinion and gives it anyway:

Item. The deceased requested noise. Item. The driver was left the right to try. Item. He tried. See attached.

We love this man. He will be back.

What is broken

It is pre-alpha, so here is an honest list from Monday’s notes, lightly edited for language:

• The flood in Lowmarsh is sometimes faster than intended. Sometimes much faster.
• Two rivals have been known to stop for a chat in the middle of the canal bridge.
• One of the sea walls in Port Saffron is still, from certain angles, a road.
• Pell occasionally assesses noise while the helicopter is still on the ground.
• Probate once appeared on the roof. He seemed fine about it.

All of it is on the list. The list is long. That is what pre-alpha means.

What comes next

Chapter two takes the road north into Verdance: jungle, a river crossing that floods, glasshouses full of rivals and, at the end, the twins. Two nephews, two trucks and, according to the brief, a chain that is optional.

Nine provinces. Eleven heirs. One car without plates. The deceased requests a little more noise.

We are not saying anything about the car without plates.

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.

The will is clear: four billion to the heir who makes the most noise. The will is less clear on what noise is. Somebody had to decide, and that somebody turned out to be us, a notary and a very long spreadsheet.

Mr Pell

Osgood Pell is the Notary-Assessor appointed by the estate. He follows the race in a white helicopter, writes everything down and reports it in the voice of a man reading the minutes of a parish council meeting.

Good afternoon. I am your Notary-Assessor. I’ll be counting.

He has four verdicts, and you will come to long for the last one:

• Noise assessed as modest. The deceased would have yawned.
• Noise assessed as moderate. The deceased would have been mildly irritated.
• Noise assessed as considerable. The deceased is sitting up.
• Noise sufficient. The deceased is satisfied. Nobody else is.

Variety, not volume

Our first scoring model counted damage. The more you broke, the more you scored. Playtesters found the most expensive thing on the map and hit it forty times. That is not noise. That is a hobby.

So the deceased now dislikes encores. Repeating yourself earns less each time, and Pell says so:

Repetition noted. The deceased dislikes encores.

Noise is scored by variety: a near miss, a drift, a roll, a jump, a rival written off, a kiosk relocated, a landmark reconfigured. Each kind of mayhem has its own line on the statement, and the statement rewards a full page rather than one long line. The loading screen puts it simply: noise is a matter of variety, not volume.

Four ways to settle

A reading of the will can be won four ways, and you choose as you go: by route, through every checkpoint first; by wrecking the family; by clearing the streets; or by noise, satisfying the deceased outright. They pull against each other. You cannot do all four. You can try.

The statement of account

At the end of every race the estate sends you a bill. It is a statement of account, itemised in the most pompous English we could manage, signed by Pell and stamped with wax. It was meant to be a results screen. It has become our favourite thing in the game.

Bollards, benches, bins: 14. Rearranged.

Rolls, complete: 3. Landed, mostly.

Near misses: 22. Nerves: frayed.

Two (2) heirs, struck from the will.

And every evening Radio Valmora reads out the standings: the Registry tonight: Prudence leads, the Kessler entry is fifth and rising. Weather: dramatic.

Every chapter of Rally Mortis ends with a final viewing: a one-on-one race against a single heir, in a place that suits them, with everything they have. Chapter one’s belongs to Prudence Vane-Holloway, who has been waiting since 1958 for a funeral worth dressing for.

You were his driver. I was his daughter. I was grieving first.

The place

The fight happens in the Lowmarsh Memorial Gardens: rows of headstones, cypress trees, narrow gravel paths, a great many wreaths and, this being Lowmarsh, a great deal of water at the bottom of the hill. It is a terrible place to drive a sedan and an excellent place to drive a hearse, which is the point. Prudence knows every path. You know none of them.

Three parts, like a funeral

The fight comes in three parts, named the way an undertaker would name them, and the game, being a legal document at heart, counts them on the statement afterwards.

• The Procession. Prudence leads at a stately pace through the gardens and rams you only when you are rude enough to get in her way. Please keep a respectful distance. Behind me.
• The Barges. Things go downhill, and then onto the water. Prudence takes the hearse out on to the barges moored below the cemetery, and you have to follow her, or find another way. Mind, barges roll.
• The Committal. The last part. Prudence stops pretending, and the hearse comes for you every time. Daddy would never have let you drive like this.

Mind the wreaths

The objective on the card is short: Wreck Prudence’s hearse. Mind the wreaths. The second sentence was a joke in the design meeting and became the most useful line of advice in the chapter. As the hearse takes damage, the wreaths come off the roof and into the road, and they are lovely, and they are everywhere, and you cannot see past them. The statement has a line for this, too: Funeral wreaths, assorted, airborne.

Lines for a boss

A boss needs more lines than a rival, and they need to get sharper as the fight goes on. Prudence starts polite and ends honest, and we have tried to make every line something only she would say:

I’ll mention this in your eulogy.

I am holding up beautifully. The car isn’t.

Flowers will follow. Something inexpensive.

How it ends, we are keeping to ourselves. Suffice to say the statement afterwards includes the line One (1) hearse, now a houseboat. We are very proud of that line.

Wade and Vee start the race with nothing: no money, no friends, a borrowed car and a dog. By the end of the road they will have a crew. Each member of it is somebody the will forgot, found in trouble somewhere along the Long Spine and pulled out of it at speed.

The first is Juno Marsh.

The rescue

Juno rents a garage in Lowmarsh from the Vane estate. When the flood comes, she is still in it, and so is her tow truck, and the water is rising faster than she would like.

Little help! She’s sinking and so am I!

The rescue is a race against the water rather than against the family: two and a half minutes to get her tow truck out before the water reaches the cab. Open the gate, hook the front, pull. It sounds simple. It is not, because the flood does not care which order you do it in, and the truck is very heavy and very attached to the garage.

Hook the front! The front, cowboy!

Cowboy. She’s met you for nine seconds.

Why rescues

Most of the game is about wrecking people. We wanted a second kind of race in the middle of it, one where the job is to save somebody, against a clock, with the same car and the same skills. It changes the rhythm of a chapter: after two races of noise and spite, a rescue is a race for someone. Players drive differently in them. More carefully, and then, when the clock gets short, much less carefully.

The crew

Once she is out, Juno joins you. She rides along, mends what she can and has opinions about how you treat the car. Every rescued crew member changes something: the car, the route or the odds. Juno’s speciality is keeping the Black Tie in one piece, which is a full-time job.

Welcome aboard. Sit in the back.

Further down the road there are others: a quarry blaster in the jungle, a rancher with a barn full of horses, an air-show pilot, a pirate disc jockey. Each of them is in a spot of bother. Each of them has a reason not to trust a man who drove for Cornelius Vane. We will introduce them as we build them.

Since we first showed the key art, one question has come in more often than all the others put together. It is not about the release date, the platforms or the price. It is: is the dog all right?

The dog is all right. This entry is about the dog.

Who he is

Probate is a bulldog. He belonged to Cornelius Vane, who left him to his fiancée in the will, and so he now belongs to Vee, who would like it noted that she was not consulted. He rides in the back seat of the Black Tie, on the side with the best view.

To my fiancée, Vivienne: my dog.

He does not speak. He does not need to. He has the best seat in the car, as the note on the key art underdrawing insists, and the expression of someone who has seen many heirs come and go.

What he does

In the race, nothing. Probate sleeps through collisions, jumps, rolls and a flooded canal town. He wakes up for exactly two things: biscuits and the sound of the gramophone. In the story panels he is everywhere: on the rug in the study, on a lead in the garage doorway, at the reading, unimpressed.

The rule

There is one line in our design document that is underlined twice, and it is this: nothing happens to the dog. Cars burn, relatives are struck from the will, a promenade is reconfigured. The dog is fine. The dog is always fine. You have our word, and in a game about a will, our word is a legal document.

Mr Horace Dunmore. Probate bit him in 1969.

That is the only incident on his record. He maintains it was deserved. The loading screen, which has met him, puts it more bluntly: Probate dislikes everybody. Do not take it personally.

Lowmarsh is the second town on the Long Spine and the first one that fights back. It is a canal town on a flood plain, built by people who looked at a marsh and thought: houses. It has bridges, quays, a bell tower, a wooden speedway grandstand and a set of flood gates that close at midnight. It also has a great deal of rain.

Lowmarsh. Half town, half bath.

Water goes up

That note on the sketch was the whole design. In every other level so far, the map you start the race on is the map you finish it on. In Lowmarsh, the water rises while you drive. Streets that were roads on the first lap are canals on the second. Quays go under. The low route through the market becomes a swim.

The water’s rising. So is my respect for roofs.

So you go up. Ramps, loading bays, the flat roofs of warehouses and the top tier of the speedway grandstand become the race line, and by the end of the race the town has turned itself inside out. Vee puts it best:

Roofs are roads now. Local custom.

The bell

When the water reaches a certain height, the bell in the tower rings. It is the most useful sound in the level: it tells you the low streets are about to go, without a single arrow on the screen. Players learn it in one race and start flinching at it in the second.

Wrecks in the rain

Lowmarsh is also where the watercolour earns its keep. Rain makes the colour run, wrecks bleed into the puddles and the whole town looks as if somebody left the painting out in the weather. Which, to be fair, somebody did.

Drowning, as a failure

If the water gets you, the race is over and Vee has a word for it.

Drowned in Lowmarsh. How very local of you.

Next: the most important member of the cast, who sleeps through most of it.

The first finished piece of music for the game arrived this week, and we have been playing it in the studio so often that we now hum it in the queue at the bakery.

The brief

We wrote the brief on one page. It asked for a theme that sounds like the opening of a television drama from 1975 about very rich people behaving badly: big brass, a clavinet, a wah-wah guitar and a bass line in a good suit. Under no circumstances should it sound like a racing game.

Racing games tend to sound like engines with drums. We wanted the music to sound like the family: grand, a bit pompous, absolutely sure of itself, and heading for a fall.

The crackle

Cornelius Vane recorded his will at 78 rpm, and the sketch of the gramophone has a note on it: crackle on every line, Vane insisted. The music took that to heart. The whole score is mixed as if it might be coming off a very good record player in a very large house, with somebody important lying in state in the next room.

A hundred and one

The tempo is a hundred and one beats a minute. That sounds slow for a game about driving very fast. It is slow, and that is the point: it is the speed of a procession, of a funeral march that has been told there is money at the end. The races have their own faster cues, but the main title walks. It walks like someone who owns the road.

It also turned out to be the perfect tempo to cut pictures to, which is a story for the day we show you the trailer.

The rest of the record

The main title is one track of several now in progress. The Reading, for the scene at the gramophone, is a harpsichord and a walking bass, very polite and very ominous. Port Saffron Promenade has steel drums and bongos, because it is a seaside town and it is summer. Halfmast, After Hours is the slow one, brushes and an electric piano, for the garage between races. The final viewings, where you meet a rival head on, share one theme, and it is the fastest thing we have written.

Sound, in general

Alongside the music we have started on the sound of the world. Each car has its own voice: the Black Tie burbles like a large dog dreaming, the hearse has a deep, patient hum, and the lorries on the Coast Road sound like furniture being moved upstairs. The best sound in the game so far is the one the gramophone makes when the needle drops. We recorded it more times than we would like to admit.

Port Saffron would be a strange place to race through if nobody lived there. So people live there: tourists, porters, pensioners, a man selling postcards, a mime, a builder on his break. Our rule for every one of them was written at the top of the first sketch.

Getting out of the way

Pedestrians in Rally Mortis are, on the whole, very good at diving. They see a black sedan coming sideways down the promenade and they remember an appointment in the opposite direction. Most of the time they make it, with a yelp and a complaint.

I was told this was a pedestrian zone!

My chiropractor will hear of this!

Two stars, would not cross again.

The game is for adults and it does not pretend that cars and people mix well. But it treats the whole thing the way a newspaper cartoon would: loud, inky, and over in a moment. The town keeps count on the statement at the end of the race, in the most bureaucratic language we could find.

Ordinance one

The Federation of Valmora has laws, and the will has opinions about them. The first one you meet is pinned to a lamp post in Port Saffron:

Ordinance 1: Pedestrians crossing during a period of mourning do so at their own expense.

There is also a radio advertisement for something called Mandatory Pedestrian Cover. Walk with confidence. Briefly.

The constabulary

The town has police, and the police have a radio, and the radio is the best running commentary we could have asked for. Constable Hobday reports what he sees, a little behind events:

Suspect is driving a black sedan, badly. Correction: very well.

Roadblock on Fourth. Bring the good cones.

Radio Valmora

And every evening, Radio Valmora reads out the Noise Registry: who is leading the race for the fortune, who has dropped out and what the weather intends to do about it. Its presenter has the calmest voice in the Federation and the worst news.

Good evening, Valmora. The Noise Registry, then the weather, then the funerals.

A world feels real when it talks about you behind your back. Ours never stops.

Lowmarsh closes its flood gates at midnight. You are on the wrong side of them, with a cliff road, a storm and three and a half minutes to fix that.

Lowmarsh closes its flood gates at midnight. We’re not swimming.

The Coast Road is the first stretch of the Long Spine, the highway that runs the length of Valmora. It is also the first level we built at night, and night in watercolour turned out to be a problem we had not thought about at all.

Painting the dark

Watercolour is transparent. The paper is the light. That is lovely in Port Saffron at four in the afternoon and a disaster at midnight, because a dark wash over white paper does not look like night. It looks like a stain.

What worked, after a week of muddy grey, was the opposite of what we expected. We kept the paper pale and let the sky do the darkness: heavy, bruised washes overhead that drip down into the cliff. The road stays readable, the world feels black, and the rain streaks across the frame like ink running down a page held at an angle.

One warm light

The note on the sketch became the rule for the whole level. Everything on the Coast Road is cold, blue, grey and wet, except for the lamps. A single warm light in a tunnel mouth tells you where the road goes better than any arrow, and when you see one, you aim for it. We use warm light as the signpost all the way down the coast.

Traffic

The Coast Road is not a closed circuit. Lorries, vans and delivery trucks use it too, and they have not been told about the will. They are on their way to Lowmarsh with fish, furniture and mail, and they are not going to move for a black sedan doing ninety.

The clock, the storm and the traffic turned out to be the best tutorial we have: by the time you reach the flood gates, you know how the car brakes, how it slides and how much a lorry weighs. Next: the people of Valmora, and their opinions.

A car combat game lives or dies by the people you are hitting. Faceless rivals are traffic. Rivals with names, faces and opinions about you are a reason to turn round and go back for another go.

Ours are a family. That helps: everyone already has a relative they would quite like to nudge into a canal.

The widow who became a daughter

In the first sketches, Prudence Vane-Holloway was the widow: black veil, wreath, hearse. It worked on paper. Then we wrote the will, and the will needed a line for her, and this is the line that arrived:

To my eldest, Prudence, who has been in mourning since 1958: finally, something to mourn.

A widow mourning her husband is sad. A daughter who has been in mourning for seventeen years, for no clear reason, and who now finally has a funeral to match the wardrobe, is a character. She stopped being the widow that afternoon. She kept the hearse.

Dossiers

Every rival gets a card, the way a solicitor might keep notes on a difficult client: a name, a relationship to the deceased and one line. The line has to do all the work. Here are some from chapter one and beyond:

• Prudence Vane-Holloway. Eldest daughter. Grieving professionally.
• Barnaby & Bartholomew. Nephews. One alibi between them.
• Sunny Solace. Stepson. Life coach. Hasn’t met yours.
• Mr Ledgerwood. Family accountant. Counts everything twice.
• Old Mossgrave. Gardener. Fifty years, one inch.
• Contessa Lavinia. Third ex-wife. Kept the title, the fur and the grudge.
• Cousin Ferdinand. Cable television. Forty channels, all of them him.

Barks

In a race, rivals talk. We call these lines barks, and each rival has a set for every occasion: when they ram you, when you ram them, when they overtake, when they are wrecked. Writing them is the most fun job in the studio and the most dangerous, because a bark you hear twice an hour has to be very good, or very short. Ideally both.

Prudence, on ramming you: I’ll mention this in your eulogy.

Sunny, on being hit: I forgive you. Legally, I don’t.

A distant cousin, overtaking on the wrong side: Passing through! Distantly related!

There are eleven heirs in all, and the will expects them to drop out one at a time. Next: night, rain and the Coast Road, which is where we learnt to love weather.

On Saturday five people who had never seen the game sat down with it for forty minutes each. We watched, said nothing and wrote everything down. Saying nothing is the hardest part. It is like watching someone assemble a wardrobe you designed, with the instructions upside down.

Four of five drove into the sea

The promenade has a beach on one side and, beyond the beach, the sea. We had assumed people would see the sea and avoid it. Instead, four of the five drove straight into it within the first two minutes, and one of them did it in reverse. When we asked why, the answers were “I wanted to see if I could” and “it looked like a road”.

Both are fair. So the sea now looks a great deal less like a road, and the beach has grown a sea wall with a few honest gaps in it for people who insist.

Nobody read the will

Our opening scene is the reading of the will, with the gramophone, the family and the executor. It sets up everything: the money, the noise, the rules. Every single tester skipped it.

We did not take that personally for very long. People skip what they think is a cutscene. So the reading is now shorter, every line is voiced, and it ends with the whole family running for their cars at once. Vee explains the rest on the way: you learn the rules while you are already driving.

“Can I run over the lawyer?”

No. Not yet. But the fact that three of the five asked told us something about Mr Crane, the executor. He was meant to be neutral. Players do not see him as neutral. We are leaning into that.

The police car

The constabulary of Port Saffron drives tiny round police cars with a single blue lamp on top. Testers loved them. They loved them so much that nobody wanted to hit them. That is a problem in a game where the police are trying to stop you. They are now slightly larger, slightly more square and considerably more irritating.

The numbers

• Average time before the first crash: eleven seconds.
• Average time before the first deliberate crash: fourteen seconds.
• Testers who asked to play again: five out of five.

That last one is the only number we are printing on a mug.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Black Tie weighs about as much as a modest house extension. It was built to glide. Over the last month we have taught it to dance, badly, which is exactly what we wanted.

Attempt one: the realistic car

Our first handling model was honest. Heavy, softly sprung, keen to go straight on. It was a faithful simulation of a 1970s luxury saloon and it was no fun whatsoever. Playtesters described it as “like steering a sofa”, which was accurate and therefore unhelpful.

Attempt two: the toy

So we went the other way: grippy, light, turning on a coin. It was fun for ninety seconds. Then everyone realised the car no longer felt like anything. Hitting a rival was like two shopping trolleys meeting in an aisle. The weight, it turns out, was the point. A collision in this game should feel like a sideboard falling down the stairs.

Attempt three: the number forty

The version we kept is heavy in a straight line and playful in a corner. Below about forty on the dial the Black Tie behaves like a dignified car. Above it, if you lift off and turn in, the weight swings to the back and the rear steps out. You catch it, or you do not.

That one threshold gave us everything. The car feels expensive and slow-witted on the way into a corner, then suddenly alive on the way out, and the hit at the end of a slide has the full weight of the car behind it.

The handbrake

The first thing the game teaches you is the handbrake. Vee explains it in her own way:

Hairpin. Like a sentence you regret. Swing it.

The handbrake turn is the most useful tool you have. It lines you up for a hit, gets you round the tight streets of Port Saffron and looks splendid on the way. We tuned it so that a good one is slightly too much, the way a good party is.

Mending the car

Cars break. Hold the repair button and Wade patches things up at the side of the road, which costs money from the estate and saves face. Vee’s view: Hold R. Mend it. Costs money, saves face. It is a small decision you make many times a race: spend now, or drive on with a door that is mostly a suggestion.

Next: where all this happens. Port Saffron, the seaside town where the race begins, and which we are going to destroy in the most loving way we can.

In a car combat game, the car is the character you spend the most time looking at. So every car in Rally Mortis is a portrait of its owner, painted in steel, and most of them are unflattering.

The Black Tie

Wade’s car is the Vane family’s black sedan: long, square, discreet, built in an age when a bonnet was something you could land a light aircraft on. It was designed to carry very rich people slowly to places where they would be unkind to waiters. It is about to be asked to do something else.

We call it the Black Tie because it is the car you wear to a funeral. Its handling is heavy and honest: it does not want to turn, and when it does, it means it. We will go into the handling properly in a later entry, because it took us three goes.

The Condolence

Prudence Vane-Holloway, the eldest daughter, has been in mourning since 1958, and she drives accordingly. Her car is a hearse with wreaths on the roof, and it is the fastest thing on the promenade.

The rest of the family garage

Each rival heir gets a car with a name, a temper and a way of hitting you that you will learn to recognise in the mirror:

• Inner Peace, the stepson’s car, which would like you to let go. Especially of the brakes.
• The Balance Sheet, the family accountant’s, which counts every dent twice.
• The Edger, the gardener’s, which has been trimming the same lawn for fifty years and is not about to stop for you.
• The Flambé, the cook’s, which is exactly as safe as it sounds.
• The Exclusive, the cousin’s. He owns forty channels of cable television, and all of them are him.
• Alimony, the third ex-wife’s. She will want it in writing.

And one more

There is also a battered red muscle car with a blower through the bonnet and spikes on the front, which started as a joke in a meeting and refused to leave. We are not telling you whose it is yet.

Next: how the Black Tie actually drives, and why we took the steering apart three times.

Vee Lark spent six hours witnessing Cornelius Vane’s will. It was her birthday. Because she witnessed it, the law says she cannot inherit under it, so she got the dog and a working knowledge of every clause.

That second inheritance turned out to be the most useful thing in the game.

The navigator problem

Most racing games with two people in the car give the passenger one job: shout the next corner. It is useful, and after twenty minutes you stop hearing it. We wanted Vee to be impossible to tune out, and the answer was already in her backstory. She knows the will. So the will can change.

Codicils

A codicil is an amendment to a will. In Rally Mortis, it is a rule that arrives in the middle of a race, read out by Vee as it takes effect:

• Clause thirty-one. A ramp is deemed to exist. (One does. Use it.)
• Clause twelve. Right of way withdrawn. Rudely.
• Clause nine. Time is of the essence. Mine especially.
• Clause three. Period of mourning. Look sad. Drive fast.

Each one bends the race for a while: a shortcut opens, a route closes, the clock speeds up, the bailiffs get interested. The clauses are written in proper legal English, then Vee translates them into something you can act on before the next bend. The idea is that you learn to listen for her voice, because her voice means the rules just changed.

Who she is

Vee is 27, a former runway model and, until very recently, the fiancée of a man considerably older and considerably richer, about which she has no illusions and few regrets. She is the funniest person in the car and knows it. She is also the only person in the story who has read the whole will, which makes her the most dangerous heir in Valmora. The family has not noticed yet.

I know every clause in that will. I witnessed it. Six hours. On my birthday.

Next week: cars. One of them is a hearse.

The will has a line for Wade. It is the shortest line in it.

To my driver, Wade, who never once said anything interesting: the right to try.

That line did more character design than a month of meetings. Wade is the man who sat in the front for twelve years while the richest family in Valmora argued in the back. He knows every road in the country. He knows which relative tips and which one counts the change. He has never, in all that time, been asked what he thinks, and he has stopped volunteering.

Quiet, not blank

The danger with a taciturn hero is that he turns into a hat with a steering wheel. We wanted Wade’s silence to read as a choice. So:

• He answers questions with fewer words than were in the question. The script has a rule: if Vee asks him something in nine words, he gets five.
• His hands do the talking. In the story panels his gloves are always doing something: tightening on the wheel, adjusting the mirror, resting on the roof of the car while a relative is being unpleasant.
• He is very, very good at his job. Wade’s competence is the joke and the point. When he finally drives as he has always wanted to, it should feel like a quiet man clearing his throat.

The suit

He wears a black chauffeur’s suit, because it is the only suit he owns, and he will be wearing it in a salt desert, a flooded canal town and on a frozen lake. We have accepted that this is unreasonable. So has he.

Wade is 38. He has driven worse roads than the Long Spine, and he will again. Next time: the person in the passenger seat, who has read every clause of the will, out loud, at speed, and would like you to know she was not consulted on the dog.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every game starts as a sentence somebody says out loud and then cannot take back. Ours was: what if the race was the reading of the will?

That was a Tuesday. By Friday the sentence had a hearse in it, a bulldog, a gramophone record and a sum of money with too many zeros, and we had started this diary so that in a year’s time we can look back and see exactly where it went wrong.

The pitch, as it stands tonight

It is 1975, in the Federation of Valmora, a country with nine provinces, one long highway and no sense of proportion. Cornelius Vane, the richest man in it, has died. He has left his will on a gramophone record, because he did not trust anyone to read it with feeling.

Four billion goes to the heir who drives the length of Valmora, from the seaside town of Port Saffron to a rock in the sea called Endmost Isle, and makes the most noise on the way. Wrecks, near misses, demolished civic furniture, a rival relative written off: all of it counts.

You play the two people who were left nothing. Wade, his driver of twelve years. Vee, his fiancée, who witnessed the will and was therefore left only the dog. The dog comes too. The dog was never in question.

Three rules on the wall

Every project needs a short list of things it will not compromise on, written large enough to be read from the kettle. Ours:

1. Every crash is a sentence. Noise is the currency. If something breaks, the game should notice, write it down and, ideally, be rude about it.
2. Watercolour, not grime. Car combat usually comes in brown and grey. We want paper, washes and colour that bleeds when it rains.
3. Awful people, beautifully mannered. Nobody in the family raises their voice. They raise their bumpers.

Anything we make from now on gets held up against those three. If it fails all three, it goes in a drawer. We have a large drawer.

What this diary is

We are a small studio called Mild Peril, and this is our working notebook, published. Sketches, wrong turns, playtests, the occasional small victory. We will show work in progress, because it is all in progress: the game is in pre-alpha, and will be for a while. Things you see here will change, some of them several times, some of them tomorrow morning.

Rally Mortis is for adults. It contains cartoon violence, crashes and a quantity of watercolour blood. Nobody in it is real, including the country.

Next time: paint. Specifically, how many attempts it takes to make a mansion look as if it was painted on a wet afternoon by someone who did not like the family. The answer is more than ten.