Development Update: Driving

We have been hard at work on big changes to Wrench and wanted to give people a preview of what is coming soon. We wrote a full driving sim for Wrench and we think it is pretty unique. The last big update was the start of our simulated sub systems (electrical, fuel, compression, etc). Those systems are dynamic and respond to the condition and part specific parameters that get fed into a larger simulation of the car’s running condition. We are taking that a step further and building a driving simulation off of all of the part data. What this means for the player is that you are driving around an assembly of a few thousand parts and they are all actively contributing to the driving behavior in real time. It also means all parts of the car are experiencing their life cycle as you drive and they very slowly wear out. This isn’t just limited to part condition. If you want the car to drive or perform differently, install different parts on it, tune your alignment, adjust spring preload, etc. As far as I know this is the only game where changing alignment involves turning eccentric bolts with wrenches. Wrench is a game that asks players to do many hours of labor and we think it’s really interesting that the player has the chance to drive and evaluate the result of that labor.

To support driving we expanded the residential neighborhood and are adding locations like a gas station, parts store, and in the future things like a paint shop, machine shop, etc. At the moment there are just over 12 miles of drivable roads surrounding your house. We also set up our existing three race tracks for driving. The game loop we are building will revolve around lap time targets on track and working through problem solving making the car fast with specific constraints. We recently got multiplayer working with driving and have a list of tasks to tie everything together before we can release a build. We want to significantly rework the introduction game experience, fix the early bugs and friction, and give people a first version of progression.

5 minutes of raw dev footage of driving different cars and locations: