This past sunday, September 1st 2024, was a very special day for me. I had planned this announcement for that day, but due to [strike]me not knowing how to properly add a tool package to an existing game on Steam[/strike] 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: [previewyoutube=96rQlAm08mU;full][/previewyoutube] 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 prepared one last major update for the occasion, the biggest one since last year's Blue Hour DLC. If you've read my previous announcements, you know I've been working for a long time on a modding system for the game. In fact, the modding system itself is already in the game, but a real user content ecosystem requires more: specialized tools and, most importantly, a place where users can share their content. And this is exactly what I bring to you today.

Slipstream Workshop Tools

I'm releasing, today, a new package called Slipstream Workshop Tools. It should be already in your Steam library (in the "Tools" section) by the time this post goes live. It includes four tools I created to aid with content creation for the game. The four tools are: * atlas, a command-line program to pack multiple images in a single texture map. * slipstream-car-template, which is not a program but a blender file. You can use it as a template to generate car sprites from a 3D model. * bride, a graphical track editor for Slipstream. * swt, a workshop upload tool. You can use it to share your content on Steam. With these tools, users can create and share new tracks, cars and music for Slipstream. For the tracks, you can create your own set of new graphics or use the ones from one of my content packages. The documentation for these tools is available at the Slipstream Workshop page. I will also post a video tutorial with a demonstration of each tool in a few days. And of course, workshop tools require a workshop. So, I declare the Slipstream Workshop officially open. But before I published my modding tools, I needed to test them in the real world to make sure they work properly. And there's no better way to test content creation tools than... creating content, right?

Supernova

As a parting gift for my community, along with the content creation tools, I'm also releasing a new content expansion called Supernova. It includes only two new tracks, two new cars and two new songs. If Blue Hour was a fancy and luxurious trip to Europe, Supernova is a lighthearted and fun camping trip to the woods. There are lots of mushrooms there. A supernova is the colossal explosion that happens when some types of stars die. While the star ceases to exist in its original form, most of its mass is spread out into space by the explosion, as cosmic dust. And, from that dust, new planets or stars can be born. As the project reaches its conclusion for me, I'm giving you, the community, the tools to create more stuff if you want. I'm not expecting it to be a big hit, it's an old game and creating content for it takes a lot of work, but who knows, maybe a small community will keep Slipstream alive in the future? Also, big thanks to my buddy Zacabeb, who helped me immensely testing these tools and giving me useful feedback. The first package in the workshop is a track he made before the tools were available, called Rural Run, check it out too!

Slipstream v1.3.3

And finally, there were some minor updates to the game itself. They're nothing major so there's no point to list them here, the new content and tools are the stars of this update. Now that the Workshop is open, I'm gonna keep two separate branches for the main game, the default and one called 'workshop'. They will contain exactly the same builds, the only difference between the two branches are the launch options on the Steam client. The default branch will just open the game as it always did, and the workshop branch will offer an option to open the track editor instead. If you plan to use the editor a lot, stay on the 'workshop' branch. If not, just leave it on the default one.

Conclusion

I guess this is where we say goodbye. Of course I won't leave the project hanging, I will fix bugs if necessary, but the modding system was the last major thing I wanted to add to it. Maybe I'll come back to make a new content package in a few years, especially if the game is somehow kept alive by a modding community, but the chances are slim. Slipstream is, at the moment, the biggest thing I've ever created in my life. I spent a whole decade with it, it brought me a lot of pain and suffering but many times more joy and excitement. I hope I can make even bigger things in the future, and I hope all of you who are reading this (and even those who aren't) come along for the ride. I want to make more games, I have lots of ideas, both in the racing genre and elsewhere. And I hope you all had a good time with my game. If it brought you joy at least once, I'm more than satisfied. Thanks, forever thanks.