Pacific Drive is a run-based driving survival game with an ever changing, mysterious landscape

Seeing as how this is Ironwood Studio’s first game, what can you tell us about the studio?

Alexander Dracott, Studio Head and Creative Director: Ironwood is a studio that features an extremely talented team, with a variety of backgrounds and levels of experience. We’ve put a lot of work into developing methods and tools that help us make bigger games, better. We are all driven forward by surreal settings and compelling gameplay that actually tells a story, and we've been putting those values towards our first game: Pacific Drive.

What can you tell us about Pacific Drive?

Seth Rosen, Game Director: Pacific Drive is a run-based driving survival adventure, set in an alternate version of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a game where you have to maintain your car and drive carefully: there’s all sorts of anomalous activity throughout the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Played from a first person perspective, you’ll sit behind the steering wheel of an old wood-paneled station wagon, your sole companion on your excursions into the Zone.

There’s an abandoned garage that serves as your base of operations: from here you can have a quiet and safe moment to repair your car, upgrade your car or garage with new items, and chart routes to explore new areas of the Zone. As you traverse strange and dangerous environments, you’ll stop periodically to get out and gather crucial materials—just don’t linger too long, or risk getting caught in a deadly storm. Explore the zone and kit out your car as you investigate what’s been left behind in the OEZ, and what’s keeping you inside its walls.

What inspired the mythology and the look of Pacific Drive?

Karrie Shao, Lead Narrative Designer and Writer: The Pacific Northwest is an extremely unique place featuring its own folklore, character, and atmosphere. Alex has always been drawn to these quieter places—oftentimes going on road trips of his own to explore abandoned industrial areas or find the most picturesque route through the mountains back home. The love of cars comes from his trusty companions on these adventures as well; the inspiration for our in-game actually exists as an old 80’s station wagon that’s taken Alex on many runs out into the Olympic Peninsula.

Gameplay-wise, does Pacific Drive have any particular influences? Does the team have any influences?

Rosen and Dracott: Some high-level inspirations of ours include games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Subnautica, My Summer Car, and Don’t Starve; stories like The Southern Reach Trilogy and Stranger Things; and the sorts of anecdotes about car difficulties you hear about on programs like Car Talk and Top Gear. But we’re pulling elements from all over: there’s a car-quirk-diagnosis system that draws heavily on Return of the Obra Dinn, emergence and immersiveness in the tradition of Looking Glass Studios and their ilk, and the game’s structure is strongly informed by that of Hades. And of course, there’s lots of personal experience with vehicles on the team (including a mechanic or two!).

Can you talk about how you discovered and iterated on Pacific Drive’s gameplay loop?

Dracott: When we started work prototyping the mechanics for Pacific Drive, it was initially just centered around the car. The ability to get in, get out, turn it on, and drive it around—all from first-person. Then we started testing different structures for what you could do with it. Following the road, gathering fuel, etc. It quickly became apparent that there were solid foundational elements of survival games that aligned with forming a connection with the car: keeping it working, getting gas, and driving it on memorable journeys.

The game ultimately clicked into place when we added first-person maintenance interactions with the car and for gathering resources (rather than relying entirely on UI) and introduced the run-based structure. You have your car, you need a safe place to work on it, so we’ve added the garage as a central point and then from there, the road trips you were taking out into the zone. That’s when we knew we had something special.

Considering Pacific Drive is a game about survival, can you talk about all of the ways in which players will have to survive?

Rosen: Although ultimately it is the player’s character that must be kept alive to keep your run going in Pacific Drive, most of the survival mechanics and related resources in the game are transposed onto the car. It’s a symbiotic relationship, though: if you take care of the car, it will take care of you. Functionally, the main aspect here is that as long as you’re sitting in the driver seat and the car is in good enough shape, you’ll be protected from incoming damage.

To maintain the car, you’ll have to take care of each part individually: everything on the car has its own health and can get status effects (plus the car can develop quirky behaviors that might crop up at an especially inopportune moment). And, of course, you need fuel to get where you’re going. So, the game mechanics and loops here will be familiar to veteran survival players, but you’ll be more on the lookout for items and resources to repair your car and keep it running, rather than materials to build a farm or something like that. A lot of the materials you’ll need can be gotten by stripping old abandoned vehicles for parts, but you’ll also be rummaging through deserted buildings and research sites, as well as making use of some of the stranger items that have started to appear in the Zone.

Can you talk about your approach to designing the interior and exterior of the car in the game?

Dracott: For both the exterior and interior of the car, we obviously start with the basics of an 80’s station wagon. Then, over the course of the game, we want to have the player’s car visually progress.

Initially, the player is improvising heavily. Taped together doors, improvised re-use of existing parts from the world—that kind of thing. As the game progresses though, the car eventually becomes that strange retro science machine that we’ve been showing, with parts created by the player for specific purposes.

For the individual visual designs, we do pay particular attention to how things are put together, even for the higher tier elements. For us, there is a goal of “exposed electronics” that we want our designs to have. A common quote around the office was “What if Doc Brown had been in a rush?” What that eventually looked like to us is that we want to keep it looking scientific, but still something that was improvised and done quickly.

Can you elaborate on how players will be able to heavily customize the car and touch upon how you implement car damage into the game?

Rosen: When you find it, the station wagon is in pretty rough shape—a missing door, a flat tire, crude parts, etc. Early in the game, you’ll mostly be restoring it to its former glory. But before long, you’ll start researching mundane, but essential, upgrades like elemental-resist doors, panels and bumpers, wheels that perform better on certain surfaces, and things along those lines. You’ll also be able to install new hardpoints on the car, allowing you to add similarly basic-but-useful things like additional storage, extra fuel capacity, battery generators, and flood lights.

As you reach the deeper areas of the Zone and find more advanced resources, you’ll get access to higher-tech parts that add abilities to the car, from the expected—a nitro boost—to more outlandish options. Every part that you craft can be installed in at least two locations on the car; a design pillar for us is “your car, your way.” In some cases, these decisions might just be aesthetic or simple preference (e.g. extra storage for spare tools goes on the rear-right window rack), but in others it might fundamentally change what the part does (e.g. installing a nitro boost on the front of the car isn’t going to get you to your destination any faster… unless it’s behind you, of course). Speaking of aesthetics: in addition to all of the above, there’s a variety of paints and decals to be found in the Zone if you want to give the car a bit of a facelift, and there are several types of cosmetic items that can be found and then equipped to the car.

As far as the implementation of damage to the car: we use an immersive-sim-style messaging system that allows us to "process" the incoming damage based on a variety of factors. Using this system, we can make sure that damage done to the car happens in a way that feels somewhat realistic, or at least makes physical sense. If you smash into something with the front right corner of your car, the damage will spread out from the impact point, dissipating as it gets further from the contact. And once the damage is applied, each part on the car will reflect that damage visually in a variety of ways, based on the incoming damage type and magnitude.

What made Unreal Engine a good fit for Pacific Drive?

Dracott: For a team of our size, the immediate thing that comes to mind is what exists in Unreal Engine 4 that’s available and ready to work with. From Landscapes, to Materials, and Blueprints there are tons of existing tools we’ve used to build Pacific Drive.

There are additional specific reasons that UE4 was great for us. When it came to designing anomalies for a driving game, we were in pretty uncharted territory, so the ability to rapidly prototype was key to finding the fun. On the technical side, we also took large advantage of Houdini Engine’s integration for our foliage system. Without that, we would not be able to build the game we have today.

Were there any particularly helpful Unreal Engine tools during development?

Dracott: One of the biggest pieces of tech from Unreal Engine that we’ve utilized as much as possible is Virtual Textures. Our landscapes are pretty detailed, especially considering the roads and some of the stranger things we’ve put into the game. Virtual Textures let us get away with some very fun shader tech that’s both sped up production and saved us performance.

The studio has mentioned it has leveraged Blueprints to construct the game’s surreal anomalies. Can you elaborate on that?

Dracott: We definitely utilized Blueprints to build almost all of the behavior of our anomalies. With the game being a driving survival experience, iteration and prototyping were key as we tried to “find the fun” and strike the right kind of balance between hazards that are both dangerous to the player in the car (and out), but also interact with our game’s systems to help create new and unique gameplay moments.

Can you share how the team leveraged Unreal Engine’s Landscape Tool and procedurally-generated foliage in the game?

Dracott: With almost all of the maps in our game being open, the UE Landscape tool was definitely critical. We didn’t want the car navigating on roads only, but taking adventure out into the woods as well. Each map being over 1 km in size and with a large number of maps total, we needed a way to quickly author content and iterate on those visuals.