Rally Master Pro

We have been working really hard on Rally Master Pro™ for iPhone since January now. In the last couple of months three engineers were working in parallel on xxx lines of code, three 3D artists were finalizing the tracks and cars, our internal QA team and our producer have been chasing the last bugs while our creative and art director always had a sharp eye on the project, to make sure that everything was polished to perfection. All-in-all, taking Rally Master Pro™ from Java to iPhone was an even bigger job than creating the original game and you will see it, no doubt! But the job is done now. We have just submitted Rally Master Pro™ and we are waiting anxiously for Apple’s approval.

Real tracks, more tracks, lots of tracks 

Rally racing is about speeding and drifting on tracks with varying surfaces like asphalt, gravel or sand as if there was no tomorrow. You need to have wide and narrow roads with straights mixed with various types of curves. The roads also have to go up and down hill and feature challenging crests or constrictions. Every track has to have a personality and you as a driver will be introduced to this “person” by your co-pilot. So you better listen carefully to him to be able to master it and become a pro – yes, we are serious about the name of the game.

If it’s a rainy day go rally racing on iPhone 

In a real rally you don’t always have nice weather. In fact, the weather condition has a great influence on the driving behavior of your car. Asphalt gets slippery when it is wet and if you are going off-road it gets worse. In winter, when racing on snow, you are drifting more than anything else and skillful driving becomes an art. To bring this experience to perfection in a rally racing game you need physics that reflect the driving behavior properly. Even on Java we had 3D physics running in Rally Master Pro™ that were calculating each wheel separately depending on whichever surface. However, on iPhone, with way more computing power, we could increase the sample rate much higher and achieve a much more accurate driving experience in the game.

Controls on iPhone matter most 

Handling and controls in a real racing game have to be spot-on. Even the best eye candy and the most advanced physics won’t make you believe you are behind the wheel of a rally racing car if the controls suck. Since tilt or touch controls and auto acceleration don’t work for everyone in the same way we have implemented comprehensive configuration possibilities in Rally Master Pro™. You can set pretty much everything the way you prefer it and even lefties have not been left out.

Give me some eye candy 

To make you “feel” the road underneath your tires you not only need good physics and spot-on controls. Last but not least, the visual feedback on the weather condition needs to be accurate as well or the illusion of being in a real rally is ruined. We already had an advanced particle simulation in Rally Master Pro™ on Java. Each wheel was emitting various dust and dirt particles depending on track and weather condition. However, on the big screen of the iPhone it was not convincing enough. So we had to start all over and create the particle system from scratch with a graphical user interface so we could tweak all the parameters in real-time. Now you can see mud flying into the camera when you drift on off-road tracks through the trees and huge clouds of dust vapor behind the car if you are on a dry, dusty road. Check out the spray when it is raining and you are racing on asphalt.

Final Word 

Of course, you always can do better and people will always find something to complain about, like there is no proper cockpit view or you can’t tune the car (actually, you are not allowed to do this in a real rally anyway) but we think Rally Master Pro is highly addictive and offers a lot of fun and great value if you are a petrol head. You will be able to find out about that yourself soon and until then we can only recommend to check out our official game trailer below.