Slipstream

About this game

Latest news

• Press Coverage·6 Sept 2024

  Retro racer Slipstream has a final update with new content, mod tools, and Steam Workshop support

  Released originally back in 2018, Slipstream is a retro racer in the spirit of games from the late 80s and early 90s. The developer came back for one final update to finish it off. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/09/retro-racer-slipstream-has-a-final-update-with-new-content-mod-tools-and-steam-workshop-support
  Read full article on GamingOnLinux

• Announcements·5 Sept 2024Official

  Going out with a bang

  This past sunday, September 1st 2024, was a very special day for me. I had planned this announcement for that day, but due to me not knowing how to properly add a tool package to an existing game on Steam technical reasons, I had to delay it for a bit. Why was it special, you ask? Well, on September 1st 2014 I posted this video on youtube: This video is the oldest record of what would become Slipstream. I had been working on it for just a week or two. And now, (almost) exactly a decade later, I'm here to announce its final major update. Fittingly, this game took me on a long and unexpected journey. Ten years ago I was a hobbyist in my bedroom, learning the absolute basics of gamedev, hoping to create small mobile games just for fun, on my spare time, and maybe even earn a little side money from that. Then came steam greenlight, a kickstarter campaign, two long and painful extra years of development, an independent release, a contract with a publisher, a full rewrite of the game's code, a second release on consoles, localizations, the DLC after five years, and finally the content of this update, which I'll talk about soon. I went from amateur to professional with this one project. It pushed me to improve my skills as an artist and programmer, and to learn more about the whole process of making and releasing a game. I learned so many things. I had never even driven a car when I released the game in 2018, and thanks to the earnings from the game I bought my first car (and the second). My childhood dream of making games professionally came true, thanks to this project and to all of you who supported me. But it's time to conclude this journey. I've been talking about it for years, I mentioned it in all of my previous update posts. I want to make other things, other games, and I think I did everything I wanted and could with this one, it's time to let it go. However, as the title of this post suggests, I don't want the this project to just fizzle out silently. So I prepar...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (ansdor)

• Announcements·12 Jul 2023Official

  Slipstream v1.3.1: Audio, Leaderboards, QoL

  Hello everyone, I hope you're doing great and enjoying the new content in the Blue Hour DLC. If you haven't installed it, please check it out, it's free after all. I'm publishing a minor update, v1.3.1, which fixes some historically problematic things and, sadly, removes a feature. But it's for a good reason. Feature removal: MP3 support. I'm not sure how many players use this feature, but Slipstream allows you to add your own music files to the game. If you put a music file in '/ansdorGames/Slipstream/music', it will be playable during gameplay and treated like any other song in the soundtrack. Up until now, the game has supported three formats: ogg, wav and mp3. When I rewrote the game in version 1.2, I switched the underlying game library from libGDX to FNA, and FNA does not have native support for MP3. For the whole v1.2 cycle and v1.3.0, I used SDL2_mixer as an alternative, but this created new problems, mostly on macOS. Supporting the macOS version is extremely hard for me because I don't have a Mac computer and the OS isn't trivially virtualized like Windows and Linux. In this new version, I removed the dependency on SDL2_mixer, so now the game only requires FNA and should run exactly the same on every PC platform. But, sadly, MP3 support had to go. The game still supports user-provided music, but only in the OGG format. If you use this feature a lot, I suggest you to convert your Slipstream playlist to the OGG format, it's a free format with many conversion tools available for every system. If FNA adds support for MP3 in the future (maybe I'll add it myself, if I have the time), I'll bring back support. But for now, it's goodbye to MP3. This should fix the recent audio problems on macOS. If you still have problems, send me an email. Audio Improvements, Engine Sounds The whole audio system has been refactored, and this brings back a feature that was lost in the v1.2 update: The engine pitch shift. Now the car engine sound is slightly more realistic and a lot ...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (ansdor)

• Announcements·28 Jun 2023Official

  Slipstream: Blue Hour - Free DLC, Now Available!

  Blue Hour, a free DLC expansion for Slipstream, is now available! The expansion brings 3 new cars, 5 new tracks and 5 new songs. More details can be seen on the Slipstream: Blue Hour DLC store page. To install Blue Hour, right-click Slipstream on your library, select "Properties", then "DLC" and check the Blue Hour box. It will eventually be added to the default install, but at the moment I'm asking for manual installation so I can measure the number of installs. I'd also like to recommend players to use the game speed adjustment setting! Slipstream can be too hard to control at the default speed, and this setting exists to make the game more comfortable to play. Don't be afraid to use it, the game is still very fast at 80% speed, and everything in the gameplay and physics remains exactly the same. If I were to release the game today, I'd probably make the default speed closer to 80 or 75%, but now it's too late to change the defaults. So, please, check this option out, it can make the game a lot more fun and enjoyable. The setting can be found on the settings menu and the pause menu. Some other notes: - I am aware that the macOS version has some audio problems since the last update. I'll look into it as soon as possible, expect a patch to fix the issues in about two weeks, maybe less. - A bug with the user content loading system was fixed in version 1.3.0-01 - There are no new achievements for the DLC. It was an oversight, new achievements will be added in the near future. - I'm still working on the modding tools Thanks for the bug reports and support, I hope you enjoy the new content!
  Read full article on Community Announcements (ansdor)

• Announcements·23 May 2023Official

  Slipstream v1.3, 5th Anniversary, and something more...

  Hello everyone, I hope you're doing great. I have big news to share with you today. Slipstream is now five years old! Time flies. The original release feels both like yesterday and a long time ago. Since then, I've worked (almost) continuously to keep this game afloat. I've done a full rewrite of the code, added many new features, and fixed all the bugs and problems I could. It's still not perfect, I guess it will never be, but I've tried my best to make it good and enjoyable. Once again I want to say thanks to all of you who played the game, gave me useful feedback and support in general. Today I bring you a new version of the game, Slipstream v1.3. As with the previous v1.x updates, I'm gonna freeze the latest v1.2 build on a separate branch (legacy-v2), so it can still be played in the future. There are major changes, so let's get to them. * A new rubberbanding system For those who don't know, 'rubberbanding' is a type of dynamic difficulty adjustment that's very common in racing games. It basically makes the AI cars more or less powerful depending on the player's position relative to them. If a player is far ahead, the AI gets faster, if it's far behind, it gets slower. A great example of a heavily rubberbanded game is Mario Kart 64. Slipstream v1.1 had a lot of rubberbanding too. In the v1.2 release cycle, I tried to remove it completely, but that created a series of new problems. It's very hard to balance a game like Slipstream, that doesn't take place in a fully 3D space where minor adjustments to the racing lines can be the difference between winning and losing. In Slipstream the cars' raw attributes matter more, and the AI got out of control because it drives in a very optimized way. To mitigate this, I had to add artificial speed limits to the AI and the whole system became more complex, ugly and cumbersome than the v1.1 solution I was trying to replace. For v1.3, I decided to bring rubberbanding back, but in a very different way. There are two types of ru...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (ansdor)