Distance Launches on PS4 & PS5 July 19th!
Today I have a very exciting announcement for everyone...
Distance: Console Edition has a release date for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5! You can get it July 19th on the PlayStation Store. Wishlist to get notified when it goes live!
Watch the exciting trailer with brand new music here:
Here's a quick overview of what you can expect in Distance: Console Edition:
Melding the intensity of arcade racing with the agility of parkour, Distance catapults you into a neon-soaked world shrouded in mystery. Adapt quickly using your car’s abilities to jump, flip, and fly to overcome deadly hazards and survive.
Campaigns: Dive into the Adventure campaign, an immersive single-player story that takes you into the heart of darkness. Afterward, return to Nitronic City in Lost to Echoes and take on a brutal challenge. Finally, visit the mysterious flying islands of Nexus (a short companion to the Adventure campaign).
Arcade Modes: Earn medals to unlock over 150 diverse tracks in modes like Sprint, Challenge, and Stunt.
Leaderboards: Race ghost replays to take on the leaderboards' best (both online and local).
Endless Tracks: With Trackmogrify, enjoy never-ending challenges with randomly generated tracks using advanced seed modifiers.
Couch Multiplayer: Challenge up to 4 opponents in high-stakes split-screen races, or try unique arena-based modes like Reverse Tag and Stunt.
Unlockable Cheats: Earning PlayStation trophies unlocks cheats like motorcycle mode, bubble car, and many more.
And a bunch of other cool features including…
Customizable controls
Level playlists
Multiple unlockable cars
Car paint job customization
Main menu level selection
And more!
What's new on PlayStation?
There are a handful of exciting new additions exclusive to PlayStation:
Haptic Feedback: The PS5 version features a completely new haptics integration. It allows you to feel the details of each impact, scrape, skid, and the abilities themselves in a whole new way. Since the haptics are largely audio driven I had a ton of fun working on this and it’s easily one of my favorite aspects of playing on PS5.
Activity Features: Easily track campaign progress from the control center, jump into a mode directly from the home screen, and see in-game help on campaign levels if needed.
Controller Lighting: On both PS4 and PS5 the controller lights with the glow color of your car. This helps to see overheat status as well as identify controllers during split-screen.
Regarding performance, Distance targets 60 fps across all single player content. On PS4 the game utilizes 1080p, and on PS5 it runs at 4K resolution. The PS4 Pro and PS5 version have both been enhanced with higher graphics quality and smoother performance. While there are dips here and there on the PS4, overall I think it runs pretty well, and it's even better on PS5 despite running at 4K.
Differences between PC and consoles
For those of you who’ve been enjoying Distance on PC, you’ll find that the core gameplay experience and overall features are extremely similar on PlayStation. There are of course some differences so I’d like to discuss them here.
I’ve talked previously about the technical limitations regarding Steam Workshop and the level editor, so at this time those aren’t available in Distance: Console Edition. Instead, we decided to officially include our favorite community-created levels directly into the base game for everyone to play. For example, our recent Kinetic Update (v1.5) on PC included 15 incredible new levels from the community and these will also be available on PlayStation!
Regarding online multiplayer, I completely understand that for some it might come as a shock to see it not included on consoles. While we have collectively spent a ton of time working on online multiplayer for PlayStation consoles, a series of unfortunate technical hurdles have led to it not being feasible for release at this time. Split-screen multiplayer is included however and allows for couch multiplayer in Arcade modes. For those curious about the behind-the-scenes technical info, please see below for a more detailed breakdown explanation.
With all that in mind, Distance: Console Edition is at a reduced price of $19.99 / €19.99. While it is possible that future updates will enable more content and features, please purchase with the assumption that the base game will not massively change in the future.
Getting into the technical details
If you’ve been following Distance for a while you’re probably aware that the PlayStation version has had a fairly long and tumultuous development. It was our first time developing anything for a console, and it’s been an incredible learning experience throughout.
Many years ago around the v1.0 launch we had a version of Distance using Unity 5 working somewhat reasonably on PS4 with several multiplayer features functional (though certainly not finished). After launching v1.1 I spent a lot of time implementing all of the various technical certification requirements for online play on PS4. This included things like parental chat restrictions, online ID consistency, etc.
As I was preparing to send a new build to Sony, I came to realize that to pass certification Distance needed to update to a much newer PS4 SDK version required by Sony. Unfortunately, this version of Unity 5.5 we used to develop Distance for years was locked to a very old PS4 SDK version, and the only option was to port Distance (yet again) to a much newer version of Unity. To comply with Sony's requirements, we needed to upgrade Unity from version 5.5 to Unity 2020. This unfortunately wasn’t negotiable and, as you might imagine, it took months to repair the various graphics and physics issues that came along with it.
The biggest hurdle was that our multiplayer system was completely dependent on the old Unity 5.5 version. The newer versions of Unity had fully abandoned their old multiplayer integration, meaning I basically had to start from scratch. One possibility was to attempt to replicate the custom RakNet backend we had relied on, but Unity’s version made several changes under the hood and without source code access it was challenging to emulate it. The other possibility was to simply rewrite everything from scratch and utilize an entirely new multiplayer system.
In short, I attempted both routes. After spending quite some time attempting to essentially rewrite all of Jason’s multiplayer tech, I realized doing this on my own will take an incredibly long time to get fully functional and properly tested. Between this issue, complications due to COVID, and my own personal issues with recovering from burnout, this was honestly a really frustrating time and one of the big reasons I decided to take a break from Distance development. As I mentioned in my September 2023 blog post I decided to go on a short hiatus to work on Project 2, and of course I enjoyed working on Project 2 so much that my short break soon became much longer.
Upon returning to Distance last year with a fresh perspective I made the incredibly tough call to disable online multiplayer for now. I would then focus on wrapping up all of the other features and content we have and get it into players’ hands as soon as possible. Of course it still took significantly longer than I expected to wrap up that last 1%, but at long long last we’re finally here.
Looking ahead
I really can’t say enough how much I’ve appreciated everyone’s patience and support during these challenging times. I’ve truly been blown away by the enthusiastic response to the Kinetic Update, and I’m so excited to keep creating and sharing stuff with you all.
To all of our new PlayStation players, welcome to the Distance community! I can’t wait to see which players take the top times on the new leaderboards. Please note that the best way to connect with other players is on the Distance Discord server.
You also might have noticed that there is a new remix of Isolation in the PlayStation release trailer. I’ve been developing a lot of new music for Project 2 and intend to release some songs officially soon, so please be on the lookout for more information about that. I’ll also be posting here and on social media when updates are released for PC and PlayStation.
Thank you all again!
Jordan
