Krautscape has been launched

The idea to Krautscape started in a project at the Zurich University of the Arts, when Mario von Rickenbach and Michael Burgdorfer started to work on a game with cars that can build their own streets to reach any point in space. The goal was to give the players the freedom to go anywhere they wanted, different to the extremely constrained worlds of other racing games. To further emphazise the freedom of movement, the cars received wings to be able to jump off the tracks.

Another core idea was to deliberately create a non-realistic environment to avoid common expectations of what's possible in this abstract space, the "Krautscape", as derived from his virtual inventor called Konrad von Krautkopf, a pretty weird guy who likes birds. As fans of racing games, but not fans of cars (there are rumors that nobody of the initial team had a driving license, but we can't confirm that officially), the team tried to find something that connects the well-proved racing game mechanics with a more atmospheric world which could appeal to more players than just racing game fans.

Krautscape has already won several important awards, e.g. GDC Best in Play and a Swiss Arts Selection & Development Grant by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

The game was launched on Steam Early Access. The developers comment: “The core mechanics behind Krautscape are complete. With Early Access we would like to expand on our multiplayer offerings by adding more players, but to do so we want to make sure online matches are 100% stable. Obviously adding more players creates more chances for hiccups, so we'll be rolling out updates to add more players to races in time. We'll also have some exciting new content for you to play by yourself and we'll have a big update that adds more variation to tracks and cars so you can win in style!

We would love the Steam Community to be involved in bringing out the full potential of Krautscape. To do so we want players to be active on the game forum pages so we can take all feedback and reported issues and put them into fixing the game and making it as much fun as possible.”