IndieGo #32: A Conversation with New Star GP’s John Dennis

Intermittently, an indie title comes along that’s so good, it challenges your expectations of what smaller teams can accomplish. Recently, that feeling occurred after picking up New Star Game’s New Star GP, an accessible arcade racer that demonstrates depth, detail, and rival drivers that actually seem to have personality. Recently, we spoke with Design Director John Dennis about New Star GP and everything from development challenges, the importance of authenticity, to pricing models.

Tech-Gaming: Hello! Can you tell us more about New Star Games? How big is the studio? What other titles have your members worked on?

John Dennis, Five Aces: There’s ten of us in the team. Simon Read’s the man at the centre of New Star, and he’s the creative drive behind some of our best-known titles like “New Star Soccer” and “Retro Bowl“. Alongside Simon, the other members of the team have in the past worked at studios such as Team17, Activision, and Rockstar, and on games like “Worms“, “Call of Duty“, and “Red Dead Redemption“. There are not many of us, but we’re all very experienced game developers and have worked together for a long time, so we’re a pretty closely-knit team.

T-G: At one time, games like this were developed and published by the heavyweights of the industry. What are some of the changes that have allowed indies to deliver remarkable efforts like New Star GP?

JD: I think there’s probably two big reasons; the first is middleware like Unity and the plugins that come with it. It means that small teams like us don’t have to develop a game from a standing start. You know, things like the renderer and the physics engine are already there, so we can concentrate our efforts on just creating the fun bit rather than having to build all of the foundations before we get to the good stuff. And the second reason is that the barriers to actually releasing a game are a lot lower now than they used to be. Back when games were mostly sold as box product in shops, someone had to front up the cost of making all of those CDs, printing boxes, packaging everything up and shipping them all over the world, and that was a cost that only publishers could really afford which meant they decided which games got made and which didn’t. With a lot more gamers buying their games from digital platforms now, any developer can release a game themselves without going to the effort and cost of manufacturing anything beforehand, so it opens the door for lots of smaller or niche games that maybe wouldn’t have gotten a release twenty years ago.

T-G: New Star Soccer and Retro Bowl have taken a similar approach to European and American football. Sure, you can jump in and enjoy and enjoy a nostalgia-inducing match. But there’s also a wealth of details if you’re interested such as interactions with the press and sponsors and handling difficult personalities. How do you go about finding the balance between sophistication and overwhelming players with minutia?

JD: With “New Star GP“, it was definitely a bit of trial and error. There are different ways to make video games: you can plan all the features up front, or you can be a bit more relaxed and let the game tell you what works and what doesn’t and see where you end up. We spent a lot of time playing the game, revising details, and seeing if the changes we made worked or made the game worse. Even then, when you think you’ve got things right, you can never be quite sure, so not only did we usability-test the game with students at a local college, but we also had a small team of really helpful beta testers, and both of those groups gave us some really valuable insights into what worked with the game and what didn’t.

 When we got the first third of the game content somewhere near where we wanted it, we released it on Steam Early Access, and again, the feedback we got was super-helpful and as a result we ended up making some pretty significant changes to the game, including a whole new level of difficulty which meant re-balancing all 176 Career Mode events. So, in answer to the question, we tried to make a best guess about what we thought would make a well-balanced experience, revised our opinions based on our own experiences, and then listened to the really helpful people who played it in its early form and gave us some really great feedback about how we could make it better.

T-G: Were any mechanics left on the cutting-room floor?

JD: The “New Star GP” cutting room floor? Oh yeah, there’s probably more than I can remember! We tried out having an upgrade tree for each car, workers that you had to assign to developing those upgrades and having to wait a number of races for those upgrades to be finished. We had staff with individual personality traits, removed them because they didn’t work, then added them back in again in a slightly different way so that they did. We had sponsor targets at one point, medium and intermediate tyres, and staff specialisms, but none of those things made it into the final game. What’s stayed in is the result of us trying things out, keeping what worked, and throwing away the bits that didn’t or that we thought weren’t needed.

T-G: In your opinion, what is the single most important component of a sports game?

JD: That’s a tough question and I’m sure everyone has a different opinion on that! I don’t know if there’s any one thing, but something we try and do whatever sport we’re working on is to create a feeling of authenticity. So, whether you’re playing “New Star Soccer“, or “New Star GP“, we’re hoping that if you’re a fan of football or motor racing, you feel like the game knows something about it and it feels in some ways a bit like the sport you love.

T-G: New Star GP strikes a taut balance between arcade-style accessibility and the intricacy of simulation. Was that always the intent, or did this emerge during development?

JD: Our starting point was wanting to make a retro racing game that was not only retro in looks, but also retro in terms of when it’s set. With that as the concept, the very next question was “how arcade do we want to make this game?” While we knew we wanted races that didn’t really last longer than 5 or 6 minutes, we definitely did want to pack all the things a real-life race driver has to deal with into that timeframe: race strategy, tyre wear, fuel load, car damage, pitting, and dynamically changing weather and track conditions. Oh, and a bit of the trademark New Star RPG features like sponsors and team management on top. So, I guess the answer is that it really was always the intent to have all those features in from the start. Development was just about how we could get them into the game in a way that was fun and light touch, and not overwhelming.

A lot of what we do is trying to simplify elements and boil them down to the maximum fun in the shortest possible time.

T-G: Virtua Racing seems to have been an influence. Are there any other games that inspired New Star GP?

JD: Yes, I think that “Virtua Racing” is probably the most obvious visual reference point for the game because of the flat-shaded polygonal look, but we all had our own retro racers that we remember fondly. Personally, my favourite is a game called “Pitstop II ” by Epyx. My brothers and I used to play split-screen multiplayer and it was hilarious. Tyres took damage which meant that you could try and knock each other off the track and out of the race, and it had a fun pitstop mechanic where if you took too long to fill your fuel tank, you’d end up emptying it and having to start again. We’ve played “New Star GP ” split-screen quite a lot in the office, and that multiplayer mode definitely captures some of the fun and dirty tactics that I remember from “Pitstop II“.

T-G: In most racers, CPU-controlled opponents seem to race around the track, mostly oblivious to your presence. But rivals in GP will attempt to block every time you pass. How difficult was it to implement this and make passing feasible but not frustrating?

JD: Once we’d created the driver characters, given them names, faces, and individual cars and teams, it was a natural progression to give them a bit of personality. They’re not only able to detect where your car is on the track, but they’re also able to read in which direction it’s headed, so if they want to, they’re capable of maneuvering to block any gap you’re going for. Whether they do or not is based on a couple of things: firstly, each driver has a personality type which decides how easily they are annoyed by the things you do, like bumping them on the track, blocking them, or trash-talking them in interviews, and secondly, each driver has an aggression level that decides how much more aggressively they drive when you’ve annoyed them. We’ve got at least one driver in each decade of racing that is not only very easily annoyed, but also drives with maximum aggression when that happens, so you’ll normally find most drivers will be competitive but polite, but depending on how you’ve played the game, you may find yourself locked in a rivalry with at least one other very aggressive driver. We took that a step further by allowing rivals to sabotage your car in different ways, challenge you to one-on-one races, or complain about you in between races, and it does feel like it’s really added a bit of humour and fun to things.

T-G: Recently, the team added an update that added Hot Lap mode, which is a surprisingly robust free offering that adds 176 different events to the game. Many publishers would have made this paid DLC, but you dropped the price of the Steam version by 40% to promote the new content. Why buck industry trends?

JD: We’ve been so pleased with how the game has been received since it came out… It really had a lot of love, and we’d very much like to thank people for their kind words. The one thing that was consistently asked for though was some sort of online multiplayer. Now, we’re only a very small team, and a full online multiplayer mode would take us a very long time to implement and test, so what we’ve tried to do is add something to the game that allows online competition. That’s what Hot Lap is; a mode where you have to set the best lap time you can and post your time to an online leaderboard. We’ve brought this out for Steam and hope to be bringing it to other platforms soon. There was never any question of us charging for the update: it’s all about us trying to add something to the game that players have asked for.

T-G: To build on the subject of pricing models, there seems to be a mounting skepticism toward premium-priced ‘cinematic experiences’. Do you feel that audiences are more willing to embrace affordably priced indie efforts, lately?

JD: I think it’s a really good thing that there’s something for everyone. If you’re into large scale games, then there’s some great titles out there for you, and if you’re into smaller indie titles, then you’re also spoiled for choice. It used to be that if you were into games, there was only one way to play them, and that was on your PC or your console at home. But now that pretty much everyone has a smartphone, you can fill even the tiniest time windows in your day with a game if you want to, so maybe a lot of us have become a little more mixed in our gaming habits. If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably never had a greater choice of games to play, from lavish cinematic experiences, to something more quirky or casual, there’s something to suit all tastes. What a time to be alive eh? 😊

T-G: What’s next for the New Star Games team?

We’re best known for our sports games, so it probably wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you that we’ve got some more sports-related fun planned. As a small team, our problem is we have lots of things we want to make, but only a small number of people to make them!