OffRoad Legends Interview With Dogbyte Games

Both the App Store and Android Marketplace contain a slew of racing games, but only a few let us drive monster trucks. With this in mind, Dogbyte Games hopes to fill the void with OffRoad Legends, a side-scrolling iOS and Android title that lets players drive those car crushers through 56 challenging tracks while also enjoying real-time vehicle deformation. We'll post a review on Thursday, but for now, check out this interview with one of the game's developers, Arpad Korda, who provided insight into the tech behind this promising title, along with the effort in porting the game to Android for its June 27 release.

What inspired you to create OffRoad Legends? Does it have anything to do with those Off Road games that came out in the 90s? Is this title in any way related?

We were greatly inspired by the popular PC bike game Elasto Mania, and our favorite PC off road Game, 1nsane [also known as Insane]. We combined them, added some sugar, spice and everything that's nice.

How many people worked on this game, and where are you located? What is the gaming culture like where you're from?

Our team has four members, all industry veterans in game development. We are located in Hungary, central Europe. PC gaming is still very popular here, but smartphone gaming has grown more popular in the past two years, driving back the handheld consoles.

OffRoad Legends bears a tiny resemblance to MotoHeroz. How is it different?

OffRoad Legends was in early development when MotoHeroz came out. It's a great game, but we wanted to make a more realistic and lifelike experience. Our goal was to achieve the feeling that comes from driving steel monsters on beautiful photo real landscapes. Of course, we have some arcade features to spice up the gameplay: nitro rockets, lava pits, destruction and huge explosions.

How easy or difficult was it to include real time vehicle deformation? We don't often see this. What iOS trickery was involved to make it happen?

Our vehicle damage model is fairly complex. Some parts can flip off like bumpers, hood, doors, etc. Wheels can be deformed and start to wobble before they break loose. We have a real-time vertex based deformation for the chassis and parts, which is a very expensive effect because we need to run through the mesh's vertices and deform them based on impact force. Today's mobile devices seem powerful enough to handle this with clever optimizations.

You mentioned the game has vehicle tuning. What can players tinker with underneath the hood?

You can find a tuning section in the garage. Currently, only suspension and wheel tuning is supported. We are planning the engine tinkering in a future update. You can change the wheel radius of the cars to transform little 4x4 vehicles to monsters. Play with suspension stiffness and dampers to make your car more suitable to climb hills.

How difficult was it to get OffRoad Legends up and running on Android while maintaining the same release date as iOS?

We finished OffRoad Legends for iOS almost a month ago, and started to port it to Android at once. It's a bit difficult to develop native apps for the Android because of the different pieces of hardware and OS versions. It needs a lot of testing on different devices. That said, we converted OffRoad Legends into a freemium game on Google Play.

Have you come up with a strategy on how to promote this game once it's released? Any concerns in that area, given the sheer number of games debuting on mobile each week?

Publicity, gaming sites, forums, Facebook. These are our main weapons to get attention to our games. Secondly, we have some friends at developer studios. They can help us cross-promote our games.

OffRoad Legends will appear on iOS and Android June 27.