If you’ve played this game, and you’re not familiar with manual transmissions IRL, you’ve probably spent an annoying amount of time trying to start the car and get it to move, let alone accelerate and decelerate smoothly. This image says it better than I can.

The sequential gearshift with clutch is meant to be a little bit obtuse, frustrating even, when you first learn, and then become very rewarding as soon as you get it down.

It’s inspired by my own experience learning to drive stick, and how embarrassing and frustrating it was to repeatedly stall on launch. From everything to the vibration patterns of the engine at different RPM to the horrible lurch as you stall or break traction on an improperly rev-matched shift, it’s a replication of that experience. Eventually, as you develop the muscle memory, you’ll overcome your initial struggles and operate this heavy, clunky muscle car that can still go extremely fast in the right hands.

However.

I also realize that this is a commercial product and not solely an Art Experience. I’m not trying to remake Melee or Rain World here. While I care about giving the player a unique, rewarding experience, I don’t want to hamstring this game’s reach by being unnecessarily dogmatic about how it’s played. At its core, this is a time attack racing game. To that end, I recently added paddle shifting, and will probably add a fully automatic driving mode at some point.

That’s also why I save everything in JSON for this game and Vapor Trails, so you can give yourself an achievement if you want without resorting to BepInEx or a binary file editor.