Being a fan of sports games can be a tricky business. AAA publishers roll out the same full-price titles year-on-year with fewer improvements and added pay-to-win incentives, all bundled up in a package that is regularly less-than-optimal on Switch. Fortunately, in the darkest of days, the indie scene is there to illuminate us.
In recent years, the Switch eShop has blossomed with indie sports titles, offering a different experience to the big leagues of FIFA EA Sports FC or NBA 2K by instead focusing on the fun of the game. Deep in the mix of the sports genre’s arcade rebirth is New Star Games, a team determined to bring an accessible twist to an often mechanic-filled playing field.
This is the development team behind the likes of New Star Manager, Retro Bowl, Retro Goal, and the upcoming New Star GP — a low-poly take on the racing genre harkening back to classics like Super Monaco GP and Virtua Racing.
There are several retro-styled racers already on the Switch circuit, of course — Formula Retro Racing, Horizon Chase Turbo, Slipstream, to name a few — so there’s plenty of competition and an eagerness from the devs to set the game apart. New Star GP is not a licensed F1 game, but with the drama and rivalries away from the circuit playing into the on-track antics here, fans of motorsport’s premier event will likely enjoy New Star’s competitive, tactical approach to arcade racing.
Before New Star GP speeds off from the starting line this March, we got the chance to chat with its Design Director, John Dennis, about what we can expect from the team’s debut lap in the world of motorsport. Our conversation covered the game’s retro inspirations, approachability, and the joys of classic split-screen multiplayer. Enjoy!
Nintendo Life: You say that New Star GP is inspired by “iconic racing games of the 1980s and 1990s.” Were there any titles in particular that you were looking back on during development?
John Dennis, Design Director: The most obvious title from the game’s visual style would be Virtua Racing. That flat-shaded polygon look was revolutionary when it arrived, so there’s a strong stylistic reference to that. In terms of play, we’ve also included a few mechanics that echo the games of that era that we loved — our checkpoint races, for example, are a direct callback to games like Ridge Racer, OutRun, and Daytona. For multiplayer, we’ve tried to capture the hectic split-screen fun of games like Epyx’s hilarious Pitstop II.
All the races take place against a driving, retro soundtrack that’s really reminiscent of those old arcade racers, so that adds to the strong retro theme that runs throughout the game. We really hope that the end result scratches that itch for players looking for a fun, retro-racing experience.
You can see these inspirations in the game’s low-poly visuals. What made you want to jump to this style instead of continuing the SNES-style pixel art route of Retro Bowl and Goal?
While the pixel art style was undoubtedly the best fit for Retro Bowl and Retro Goal, the flat-shaded polygonal visuals just seemed the most suitable style for New Star GP. That’s it really! It just sort of worked right from the beginning.
The Switch is already home to several retro-inspired racers like Super Woden GP, Hotshot Racing and Formula Retro Racing. What’s your opinion on these other low-poly racers and what do you think sets New Star GP apart from them?
we’ve tried to do something very different
We looked at a lot of different racers for inspiration, going right back to classic arcade games and mainly older consoles. As highlighted in those great examples in your question, the Switch is a wonderful place for retro-inspired racers that capture that old-school graphical style and gameplay really well, but I think we’ve tried to do something very different to those games. We’ve made the game that we wanted to make and play. Our main goal was for us to like it and to get that across to the players so they’d like it.
Whenever we approach making a sports game, we look at how we can squeeze all of the depth and excitement of it into as short and fun-packed a play session as we can. In New Star GP, we’ve included everything that real race drivers have to think about, from pitstops and tyre strategy to improving the performance of the car and dealing with dynamic weather changes during races, all inside intense five-minute GPs. Back that up with a compelling RPG that sees you upgrade your car, and manage your own motorsport team across 50 years of racing, and that’s what sets New Star GP apart.
Split-screen multiplayer was such a large part of the gaming experience in this era — how important was it for you to have a strong local multiplayer mode in this game?
It was right near the top of the list from the very start! The development team are all big racing game fans and a lot of us have worked on social multiplayer games previously in our careers, so we really wanted to capture a bit of that magical multiplayer fun in New Star GP. I think the multiplayer is one of the best bits of the game. There’s always a lot of laughing and shouting when we play in the office, and we have a couple of very dirty drivers on the team who’ll go to any lengths to win!
we were mindful that people have different tastes and want to experience our games in different ways
There are 17 different pre-made multiplayer championships to compete in, a player handicap mechanic so you can make races fairer for players of different abilities or players who haven’t played before, and we’ve also included a Creation Mode, so you can create your own single or multiplayer championships. You can tinker with CPU difficulty, race speed, number of laps, weather, and a host of other features until you get everything exactly as you and your friends like it.
For the Switch version, we really wanted to take advantage of every console having two Joy-Con controllers, so the game has an alternative control setup for playing with a single Joy-Con. This means that two people can quickly take a Joy-Con each and hop straight into a split-screen game, so hopefully as many Switch players as possible get to experience how frantic it can be! The Switch is a great platform for doing extra fun things with the controller possibilities — for our previous games, Retro Bowl and Retro Goal, we made sure that you could play with Switch Online’s NES controllers — so we knew that having two players with a Joy-Con each was something which we absolutely had to include.
Many New Star Games titles strip their respective sport down to its most basic elements and then add depth behind the scenes. Can you tell us how you have continued that trend in New Star GP?
Absolutely! That idea of condensing the experience and distilling the fun into bite-size chunks is central to the games we make. In New Star GP, we aimed to concentrate all the excitement and drama of real-life motorsport into something as immediate as possible. That started with track construction and race duration. We built all of our tracks so that each lap could be completed in about a minute. After some play testing, we decided that a six-lap race was just about long enough to make a variety of different pit strategies viable, but short enough that when you finished you wanted to race another one. So while all our GPs are only six laps long, they still feature different race strategies, dynamic weather, pitstops, component damage, and tyre blowouts. Basically, all the excitement of real-life motorsport is squeezed into a five or six-minute race.
there’s plenty of challenge there for even the most dedicated racing fan
Of course, if you want a longer race experience, you can race up to 99 laps in the fully customisable Championship Mode. While we had an idea about the experience we wanted to create, we were mindful that people have different tastes and want to experience our games in different ways.
Away from the track, we’ve brought another New Star hallmark to the game: managing resources and making decisions that affect your race experience. You earn BUX for success on the track, and these can be spent on upgrading your car in various ways such as increasing acceleration, improving tyre grip, licensing technology from other teams, or improving the happiness of your own team.
Add to that the post-race interviews and dilemmas where you can improve or ruin your relationships with the other drivers on the grid (angry opponents drive more aggressively) and there are quite a few things to think about away from the pit lane that can have a massive effect on whether your season is a successful one or not.
Can you tell us a bit about the race variety that the game’s Career Mode offers?
Sure. We have six different event types:
Time Trial is the simplest of the events. This one requires you to complete one lap of the track without any opponents within the time limit. It’s all about sticking to the racing line and keeping as much speed as possible through the bends. Checkpoint Race is a callback to those games of yesteryear. You’ve got to complete two laps of the track before the countdown runs out with each checkpoint you hit adding a few seconds to your time.
Rival Race: Annoy a rival driver enough and they may challenge you to a one-on-one race to prove they’re a better driver than you. It’s a straight shootout, with the winner collecting the race rewards and getting to do the trash-talking afterwards. Elimination events are a matter of survival. Every 30 seconds, the driver in last place is eliminated, so it’s important to get a good start, and then try and work your way up through the field as quickly as you can. Reverse Race events see you battle your racing rivals racing around a track, but in the opposite direction to normal.
There’s something really satisfying about getting your strategy just right
Finally, GP is the main event of each race weekend! First, you’ll need to choose your race strategy based on the track type — circuits with long straights and shallow bends may favour hard tyres and a one-stop strategy, while more technical tracks may favour the grippier soft tyre and a lighter fuel load. Once the race starts, you’ll need to battle your way past your rival racers, execute your pitstops as quickly as you can, and hope that you don’t have a component failure or the weather doesn’t ruin your plans. A downpour of rain can completely change the race situation for better or worse! There are 10 GPs in each season, and each one can only be raced once, so the pressure’s really on to get your race strategy and performance right for the big event of each race weekend.
You’ll start your racing career in the 1980s, and if you win that season, you’ll qualify for the 1990s season, with a new car, new rivals to compete against, and a new collection of tracks to race on. Continue your success, and you’ll get to race the 2000s, 2010s, and into the 2020s, each decade of racing being quicker and harder to win than the last. Across the five decades, there are a total of 176 events to race, 34 tracks to master, and 17 locations around the globe to visit, so we hope there’s plenty of challenge there for even the most dedicated racing fan.
Racing through different decades in Career Mode sounds really interesting. Aside from the difficulty increase, how did you go about separating one decade from another? Did you look at Formula 1 history for specific reference points?
Well, as you say, some of the differences between decades are about changing the level of challenge you face as you progress, but the difference isn’t just about difficulty, we’ve also added a few other things to bring an individual flavour to each of the different decades:
Elite-level motorsport is fascinating and has undergone many changes over the decades, so there’s definitely some inspiration there for what’s gone into the game, from how the sport has evolved and the stories that have emerged. We wanted the players to see and feel those changes as they progressed from the ’80s.
Every new decade brings three brand-new car body shells, meaning that the visual style of the cars evolves over the decades. The tracks have two different configurations; a short version and a long version. In the 1980s you’ll exclusively be racing the short versions of the tracks, but as you progress into later decades and the cars speed up, you’ll find yourself racing more and more of the longer versions. Additionally, the tracks that appear in later decades are more technical than the ones that appear in earlier decades, but every decade brings new race locations to experience.
Each decade also has a unique selection of opponents to face. Drivers have a set of character traits that define their behaviour on and off the track. Not only do they have personality traits but also each driver has a set of stats that dictate their driving abilities. Each opponent in the game is different, so each decade presents a different type of challenge in the opponents you face. We also have a rival relationship mechanic in the game that tracks your relationship with every other driver — crash into other drivers regularly, or say mean things about them after races and they’ll get angry with you. Drive cleanly or compliment them on their skill, and they’ll grow to like you. Each decade of racing has at least one rival driver who is very easily annoyed. Now, if you’re careless enough to make them your nemesis, they may decide to sabotage your efforts to win the championship in some way. I won’t say how they do that, but the consequence of making an opponent a nemesis is different in every decade.
Lastly, there’s a different set of perks available in each decade, meaning different combinations and strategies are available to try out.
Many Switch arcade racers lean into a fantasy mechanic like boosting, drifts, or items. Was it your intention to keep New Star GP more realistic or are there some fictional surprises under the hood?
Well, the mechanics of the racing are mostly based on simulated real-world physics, but you do have a boost at your disposal. This is a bar that refills once a lap and is something like DRS or KERS, giving you a burst of speed when you might need it to catch an opponent or speed past a rival on a straight. Learning the tracks so you can boost at the right time to get the most out of its effects can be vital to your race performance.
We’ve tried to create a variety of circuits that suit all driving styles and preferences
We also have perks. As you complete race events, you’ll have a chance to choose which perks you want to unlock and activate: Engineering Perks generally increase performance on the track. They might give you better off-track handling for those times you undershoot or overshoot a corner, or the ability to slipstream and gain speed from opposition cars. Pit Crew Perks increase your performance during pit stops. They might make refilling your fuel tank quicker, or increase the warmth of your tyres after pitting, giving you more grip straight out of the pits. Commercial Perks don’t increase your car’s performance during races but instead come in the form of sponsors (whose logos you can apply to your car) that increase the rewards for winning. These might pay out for finishing on the podium, winning a race without having any crashes, or completing a GP on a one- or two-stop strategy. It’s up to you to choose sponsors that suit your race strategy or driving style.
Choosing the optimal perk loadout can be as important as choosing the most suitable race strategy, but it can be a tough decision choosing between boosting your chances of winning or increasing the rewards you get for doing so. You only start with three perk slots unlocked, so you’ll have to make some tough decisions about which perks make for the best combination. There’s something really satisfying about getting your strategy just right, finishing the race with all four tyres ready to burst and not a drop of fuel to spare.
What considerations did you have to make when designing the different tracks in the game?
While we’ve set our race events at famous motor racing locations from around the globe, all our track designs are original and unique. We’ve tried to create a variety of circuits that suit all driving styles and preferences: power tracks with long straights and sweeping bends that suit cars with high top speeds, and more technical street circuits with sharp bends and chicanes that suit cars with high acceleration and handling. Hopefully there’s something for everyone.
Your games have covered football (both types), cricket, baseball, and now driving. What sport would you like to take on next?
We’ve actually got a few cool things lined up already, but I’m not sure we’ve announced anything just yet, so I can’t say anything. Sorry about that!
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Thank you to John for taking the time to answer our questions. New Star GP is set to release on Switch in March 2024 — we’ll let you know as soon as there’s a solid date.
