We are super happy to be able to talk with the team behind DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeatan up-and-coming, fast paced, retro-style platformer, using cars!

0. Tell me a bit about yourself and team.

I’m a Lead Developer in Tarboosh Games, an indie game studio, and currently in charge of the development of DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat. I started making mobile games seven years ago, I released a couple of them on my own using cocos2d-iphone, and three years ago I started using Cocos2d-x. Tarboosh Games family is composed of talented game developers, designers, and animators who are hardcore gamers as well.

Two of our released games are made with Cocos2d-x (Desert Zombies and Mr. Know It All) and we are currently working on a new exciting game concept (working title Longest Ride), besides DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat. For more information about us and our released games you can visit our Press Kit and follow us on Twitter.


1. Tell us where you came up with the idea for this game. What were your inspirations?

DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat was originally created to be an impossible drifting/driving game that’s also addictive and goal oriented, we’ve made a lot of prototypes and eventually settled for this one, then a proof of concept video was made and submitted to Steam Greenlight, it was greenlit on Steam in eight days, reaching the top 100 status out of all games on Greenlight. The game underwent a name change, originally the “Drive” part of the title was “Drift”, so we changed it so players don’t get the impression that it’s a “drifting” game.

Our inspirations included great games like the original Micro Machines (developed by Codemasters in 1991) and some of the modern games like Cut the Rope, Must Deliver, Retry and Mr. Jump. Having such inspirations, helped us come up with an original idea and concept that captures the essence and great traits found individually in these games while standing strongly on its own.



2: What more can you tell us about DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat?

DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat is a retro style, ludicrous auto-forward driving game with an amazing twist, and absolutely no brakes! The game is a fusion of classical puzzle and platformer elements with drifting/driving mechanics, an original concept not done before, and feedback from our beta testers was amazing! Game is addictive and fun! It may look easy, but it isn’t! The game has an “Oh, I’ve figured it out!” moment almost at every curve in every level!

DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat is a thrilling experience for casual but even more so for hardcore gamers! Beat the learning curve and become a master! Play against your ghost or our 3 star ghosts to enhance your time! Beat through the levels in sequence or skip ahead.

Driving and crashing has never been this fun! An experience that will grow on you as you get to explore vivid retro style environments and mouthwatering mechanics that span over 45 levels in 3 different worlds!

Game features:

• The hardest-car-game-in-the-world!
• 3 atmospheric worlds, 45 hand-crafted levels and 3 impossible bonus levels

• 135 optional secretly hidden objects!

• Crazy fun! Multiple solutions per level!

• Simple to learn, hard to master, impossible to put down!

• Retro style pixel art graphics!

We are planning to release the game on Steam sometime in November, 2016, and on mobile devices early 2017. On Steam it will support Windows and Mac, and on touch devices it will be made available on iOS, Android and Apple TV.

3. What version of cocos2d-x did you use?

When we started development we used Cocos2d-X 3.10, halfway through we upgraded it to Cocos2d-X 3.11.1 and we will keep updating to make sure we use the latest version.



4. How did you decide to use cocos2d-x instead of Unity, Unreal Engine or SDL?

Cocos2d-x is a fast, reliable and free open-source engine that yields robust outcome when it comes to mobile games. Having been using it for more than three years now to release 10+ mobile projects on both iOS and Android, we were confident that it will be the right choice for DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat! Similarly, using the Cocos2d-x engine to build the game for Steam (for PC and Mac) was a breeze and we couldn’t be any happier.


5. What features did the engine offer you that made development easy? What do you wish the engine did better?

Cocos2d-x is great solid engine, it has so many features that made it easy for us to develop this game and dozens of other games before it, there is also a great community supporting it, and most importantly for us it’s easy to maintain on multiple platforms.

For the future we are planning to expand beyond PC and mobile and so we wish the engine could add native support for Apple TV and consoles.


6. What tools did you use besides the engine?

We’ve used LevelHelper 2 for building the levels and the SpriteSheets.

7. What 3rd party libraries did you need to use?

We used these great 3rd party libraries; Box2d for the physics, LevelHelper 2 Runtime, BrainCloud for leaderboards and Everyplay for recording and sharing your gameplay (on mobile).



8. Did you create the art yourself? What tools?


All of the art was done in-house. We have used Adobe’s Photoshop for the pixel art graphics as well as Illustrator in other parts. It is worth noting that many of the animations and effects were programmatically created to give a proper retro feeling. The work done on the graphics for DCR: Drive.Crash.Repeat was immense, considering that we handcrafted 45 levels across 3 different worlds.


9. Did you create the music yourself? What tools?

We’ve composed and edited some of the SFX ourselves, we also licensed some tracks and used some Creative Commons Attributed assets.


10. Will you continue to make games in the future?

I will surely continue making games in the future, that’s something I’m very passionate about and I enjoy doing it a lot, it’s fun and satisfying.



11. Do you use SDKBOX? If so, what plugins are you currently using?

Of course! We are using Google Analytics, Fyber, PluginIAP, PluginReview and Facebook.



12. Lastly, any advice for those also making games on how to get to a release point?

My advice for developers is not to be hasty in releasing their games, but rather take some extra time to polish them, and I also urge them not to do the art themselves if they are not good at that.

Having said that, it’s also very important to make rough deadlines and stick to them, because having an open-ended deadline when making games will be a temptation to continuously add more features, levels, mechanics, etc. which could turn disastrous in terms of project delivery. Setting up deadlines and sticking to them is what we do in Tarboosh Games and that’s how we successfully managed to finish six different games on multiple platforms within our first year in the market, some released and some are in the process.