Kerala was the first road we built for Sadak Fury, and it set the bar for everything after it. The idea was simple: one ride should feel like a road trip across the whole state. In reality the places on our route are a long day's drive apart. In the game they are one 10.5 km run.
Six stretches, one ride
The Kerala road is split into six stretches, and each one has to look, sound and ride differently from the last.
- Kochi city and Fort Kochi. You start under the metro viaduct, with the Chinese fishing nets on the sea wall and a white church on the corner.
- The backwaters. A long, fast straight beside a canal, houseboats drifting past and humped bridges that throw you into the air.
- Rubber belt villages. Rows of rubber trees, red laterite walls and a temple with a tiered roof.
- The rainforest. The road dives into dense green and passes close to a big waterfall, which faces the road so you see it coming.
- The Churam hairpins. Nine hairpins behind chevron barriers, where braking well beats being brave.
- Munnar tea summit. Tea hedges follow the slope, pluckers work the rows, and the finish arch is made of bamboo.
Chasing the painted look
We wanted Sadak Fury to look like a painting that moves, with bright colour, puffy clouds and a roadside packed with life, without asking more of a phone than it can give. The road went through several look passes, each compared side by side with the concept art:
- Painted materials. The ground, verges, walls and even the sky are painted, and they're lit by a simple shader that keeps the colours flat and bold.
- A horizon that never ends. Hills, palms and distant ranges wrap around the whole track as continuous bands, so you never see the edge of the world.
- Forests that work from every angle. Our first forest was a flat wall of trees that looked like cardboard from the side. We rebuilt it as a forest of tree cards that always face you, and it now looks full from any angle.
- A real waterfall. The first waterfall was a picture. It is now a 3D fall in a forested gorge, with two layers of water and mist at the bottom.
Things that broke on the way
Every look pass broke something. Some highlights:
The camera that flew through the fishing nets. On the Fort Kochi stretch, the chase camera kept flying straight through the bamboo boom of a fishing net, which filled the screen with a brown slab for a moment. We moved the nets out over the water, where they belong, and added a check that pushes anything placed near the road out of the camera's path.
Leaves in your face. Dense foliage is great until a palm frond fills the whole screen. Now foliage, tree cards and mist fade out as the camera gets close, so the road always stays readable.
The ghat that ate the road. On the climb to Munnar, the hillside sometimes cut into the road itself. We rebuilt the ghat so the slope follows the road in fine 2 m ribbons, and every cutting gets a tapered stone retaining wall, like the real ghat roads.
Buses standing on their noses. A few traffic models arrived with the wrong rotation, so for a while Kerala had buses buried in the tarmac. That fix was quick, and the screenshots were funny.
Life on the road
A Kerala road isn't empty, so ours isn't either. Autos, fish carts, state buses and lorries painted with HORN OK PLEASE share the road with you, and jeeps take over near Munnar. Villagers walk along the verge in groups. Cows, goats and elephants stand by the temples and in the forest, with the plants cleared around them so you can actually see them.
Kerala has company now
Kerala was the template. It gave us a track generator, a painted look and a long list of rules, such as "never let the camera fly through a prop", that every later road had to follow. With that template in place, the rest of the map came together quickly, and Kerala now has five neighbours on the road trip across six states.
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