Wow, I’ve already lost a feel of the time. When I started project back in 2014 there was a lot of things I wanted to make in the game as essentially I wanted to create a tribute to the Driver. Time came and in already in 2015 game built up into something more unique than just a Driver 2 clone and also scope has been grown into something that seemed achievable, even if technically that was quite complex.

Many years later, the development is still ongoning. The first release in 2019 was more like an outline of the project that it has about to become and after tons of feedback from the community subsequent updates came which are shaped the game to the state it was already good enough and stable enough to go with.

The last public update of the game happened in January 2022 and since then - nothing but preview builds later came to no public builds. I just joined Saber Interactive at the time and since then development of project quite a challenge to overcome: frustrations due to use of custom game engine as technical problems grown as new feature gets implemented, a short list of large but unimplemented features hard to implement - it needs quite a lot of iterations of development and testing, especially with custom game engine. Back then there was multiplayer support and mobile port and everything had to be postponed. At some point I was even thinking of hiring a programmer and even a level artist, but time constraints and hobby nature of the project did it’s thing - postponing features and doing what I can do best probably did it it. The experience at Saber was also big push for me.

This update is more like a technical one, and I think now I’m somewhat proud of it - the engine recieved new renderer and technologies that made it run faster than it ever ran before and at same extent game itself internally packing large amount of features it has not seen in base game yet. The biggest one - implementation of one of the complex racing path planners described by Fast Cars, Big City paper Content-wise there’s isn’t much but since Matti has left development of The Classic Syndicate it has became one of my technology playgrounds, especially for AI. Since then addon was updated to use latest features of scripting, animation and AI system and now it is available to player.

The community surprisingly is still remaining active to these days, even if hype is gone. People like NikkiChan92, Mutt377, SherbetJutsu, SwissCruiser, AndreyN, Commando52Colto, Matti and Hallgarth were helping this project to get through many of the test builds bugs across years (huge thanks to everyone). Nikki was helping closely to get this release, testing every build while building up her glorious Victoria city, which was really driving the technology progress so now game runs this ultra-complex city at smooth framerates with little to no stuttering at all.

I think it is finally time to release update of game. And for first time I’m putting it here on Itch.io and I hope everyone have a good time with it. Below you can find installer for main game and the featured addon I’ve been preparing for this update.

You can also join Driver Madness Discord server to discover fantastic mods made by the Community and even get inspiration and help to create your own one!

Also as Christmas time gets closer, I wish everyone happy holidays and happy new years in advance.