Drive Isle

Drive Isle is an island for one purpose: To Drive around and explore. Drift if you will.

Drive within speed limits, use indicators and stop to traffic lights, but there's no enforcement, there are no police on this island. Trees or other obstacles will destroy the car however, but that is adjustable (down to 0%) and there is also road service to help.

Vehicles need to be fueled up at a gas station from time to time, unless fuel consumption has been adjusted to 0%.

New game can be started owning all vehicles and houses (but no possibility to level up), or starting from scratch slowly earning money to purchase vehicles and new housing with parking slots.

There are missions without time limit, but also time attack challenges to earn money from. Some times a treasure of some sort, piece of scrap metal for example can be found on the road side which can be sold to a scrapyard. It could also be a tuning part to be used, sometimes even money or a new car in a abandoned container which maybe some truck accidently dropped there.

Drive Isle was released on Steam 2017/08/15 as early access which means it is unfinished here and there at this time, for example many areas of the map lack detail beyond basic plants & trees, if that.

The game is offline only at this time, although basic multiplayer system exists within the game it will need more work.

Graphics are subpar to many nowadays titles, but hopefully will improve in the future with improved texturing, utilization of bump mapping, increased details on buildings for example, improvements in lighting overall, etc.

Development history

The game has been in development for 10 years by one person as an hobby.

Biggest inspiration for the game was the original Test Drive Unlimited and the Havok physics engine that had been recently made free for PC developers.

The development years include lots of graphics engine work, complete game & engine rewrite (DX9->DX11), map editor with multiple iterations of terrain / road generation systems, numerous test maps to go with them, a building editor, the game itself but also numerous months of not working on the game much because of other things or issues in personal life.

Game was originally planned as online only, profile data was saved directly to a server, but was later converted to offline because of various reasons. Online profile could in theory be still a possibility in the future however, as the offline profile system has been built with compatibility for both.

Most of the 3D assets have been purchased. Physics are handled by Havok physics engine, which for free support was ended as Microsoft acquired Havok.

Modding support

Currently there is no modding support, but Steam Workshop is in the plans for tuning parts, vehicles etc as well as release of the map editor for custom maps.