It was supposed to be a shooter

The first thing in this project’s history is a design document, dated 27 December 2025, for a top-down shooter. The first few commits show exactly how seriously that went:

27 Dec  Add top-down shooter design document
29 Dec  init
30 Dec  Hue!
30 Dec  Epic weapon features
 2 Jan  Tons of models, weapon attachments, mag system, dynamic roof system

The first week of January added fog of war, weather, puddles that fill up in the rain, a snowball throwing system (yes, really) and a shooting range with scoring. On 8 January a design note for a vehicle transmission appeared. Two days later there was a wheeled vehicle, a tank and an armoured personnel carrier. The day after that, a helicopter.

By the middle of January almost every change was about how something with wheels moves. Nobody cancelled the shooter. It just stopped getting any attention, and the last of it was deleted in June.

What took over was one question: how does a car actually put its power into the road? Nine months later, the answer is still being worked out.

Build it, measure it, build it again

Read the history in order and it looks indecisive. Six islands. Three road systems in one summer. A steering rack built properly and then deleted a month later.

Read it one system at a time and it’s the same loop over and over. First comes the quickest version that could possibly work, so there’s something to drive today. Then it gets measured. The game has test rigs that drive the real cars through fixed manoeuvres (a skidpad, a step steer, a braking test), so a change shows up as a number rather than a feeling. Then it hits a wall, and gets rebuilt by someone who now knows what the wall looks like.

The tyres are the best example. The very first one, in January, was a simple brush-friction curve. After that came an arcade tyre, the industry’s classic curve-fit formula, a hybrid with separate “stuck” and “sliding” modes, and a version where grip builds up over distance. In August it went back to a brush model, a proper physical one this time. The note in the project before that rewrite reads: “rip it out… if it makes the game currently broken, so be it.” It did break the game, in three known ways. It was still the right call.

Some attempts were never meant to last. A soft-body crash model was built just to see what it would take, and two experimental road builders to find out what the real one was missing. None of them ship, but bits of all three do.

The timeline lays all of this out, one thread per system, with every rewrite and the reason for it.

The islands

Real terrain was the plan from the start. Real places have roads that make sense, because a few generations of people have already argued about where a road should go.

Porto Santo and La Palma came first, in April. La Palma later got a photoreal pass, a volcano and a lava river. Hachijō-jima was first imported in July. In late August came Madeira, Gran Canaria and El Hierro, which is also when everything moved to full 1:1 scale, and El Hierro was the live map for most of September.

Each island broke a different part of the pipeline: scale, streaming, coastlines, textures. When the game came back to Hachijō on 24 September, it was with a far better set of tools than it had in July. More on that in Hachijō-jima at 1:1.

Some numbers


First commit	27 December 2025
Commits since	13,000 and change
Busiest month	June 2026, about 3,400 commits
Islands tried	6
Tyre models	6
Snowball systems	1, retired

The shooter isn’t missed.

Filed under history, behind-the-scenes