QJ: The game looks incredibly polished, even for a triple A title. So how long has Nitronic Rush been in development and where did the inspiration come from?

JH: The game has been in development for 18 months now, starting in May 2010. The team's original gameplay inspiration came from a wide variety of sources including older games like Wipeout, Rush 2049, Hydro Thunder, and Trackmania. From there, playtesting and the development of our technology really ended up driving a lot of the game's design decisions.

QJ:  How many people are on your team?

Four programmers and a designer started the project the summer before my Junior year, and now 17 months later there are 11 team members in total. This now includes 4 artists for concept art and some modeling, as well as a full time sound designer and an assistant composer (you can see the full listing at: http://nitronic-rush.com/about-us).

QJ:  Where did the idea of the game mechanics to make the car move in more than just the usual racing dimensions come from (car goes forward, car goes reverse, car crashes into wall)?

JH:  The idea of having the car boost, jump, and fly were actually design ideas from really early on. Since the beginning we've held playtesting sessions to help decide what was and wasn't fun. During one of these sessions our physics programmer Jason Nollan accidentally left a testing feature enabled which allowed players to rotate the car any way they chose, and every player that discovered it thought it was a blast. Ever since then we kept this feature and tweaked it further for use in our Hardcore and Challenge levels.

JH:  I didn't personally know about RollCage until we shipped the game, but I'm sure that it was in a couple of our developers' heads. Tron on the other hand (and more specially Tron: Legacy) was definitely a favorite of everyone. We all went together to see the movie the day it came out, and it's been a definite influence visually and musically.

QJ: I'm amazed that something that looks and plays this good can be free.  Was the game always going to be free?

JH: Yep, since the game is fully owned by DigiPen we're not able to sell the game. This works pretty well for us though since we love to see as many people as possible get access to the game. All we ask of our fans is that they look out for projects from us in the future.

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