Heading Out is an upcoming narrative racing game developed by the Polish development team; Serious Sim Games. The game features a distinct monochromatic art style and is inspired by road movies like Thelma & Louise and Duel. It also features Roguelike mechanics and includes a total of 133 unique quests that players can complete.
We recently got the opportunity to pick the brains of Szymon Adamus, who is the Business Development Manager at Serious Sim, and learn more about what to expect when Heading Out launches on May 7 2024. Szymon spoke a lot about how important the team’s influences were in creating this game, as well as the reason that they chose to employ such a distinct art style and more.
Heading Out will let players live out all of their open road fantasies
FandomWire: Looking at the trailer and hearing the chase-based concept of Heading Out, a sense of brilliant simplicity seems to be a core value of this game. Although, it is still a narrative-driven experience, so I am curious how you married those two values as a team. How did you bridge that gap of telling a deep story through driving?
Szymon Adamus: The act of driving itself is connected to player progression in the game. The narrative part of Heading Out is told through interactive comic book cutscenes that match the distinct art style of the game. Those cutscenes are interactive in the sense that they allow players to make narrative decisions. These decisions will have a direct effect on the races that follow. We have tried to pace the narrative elements of the game evenly in order to give players a break from constant high-speed chases. The two elements co-exist in the final product.
FW: I love style of the comic book cutscenes in the game. They really put me in mind of Frank Miller’s Sin City, which is a comic book that I love. Was that one of your influences when creating the art style of Heading Out?
SA: We did take inspiration from a lot of other media, especially with regards to the monochromatic art style. The decision to make the game black and white was made very early on in the game’s development. That choice was made because we wanted our game’s visuals to stand out, and also because we wanted to evoke the cinema of yesteryear, which so much of our influence came from. However, there were some drawbacks to this choice that we had to work around. When you remove all of the color from a game, you lose a lot of fidelity in terms of visual communication.
For example, if another car you are racing against drives far off into the distance, it becomes almost invisible in black and white. This lead to us jumping through many technical hoops for the sake of sticking to this vision, and there were times when we questioned our decision. At the end of it all though, we feel it was the right choice. We are proud of how the end product looks and how it stylistically matches our influences that we took from.
Play that funky music fast boy
FW: The other huge component of Heading Out that I have to ask you about in the soundtrack. The game features an original soundtrack and I wondered whether the developers worked hand-in-hand with the musicians to craft these songs that match up to the story being told. It reminds me of what Edgar Wright did in Baby Driver in terms of how the songs being played matched up with the visuals being shown. How tight did those teams have to work together to match those elements up consistently.
SA: Edgar Wright is the master of great editing and sound mixing. We do have a dedicated composer on our team who works on both music and sound effects on all of our games and it was a collaboration of many people. Our composer took the lead, but he utilized the assistance of other talented people to help with certain vocals and instrumentation. Like any other aspect of game development, it is never one person doing everything and music is no different. We have got 19 original tracks, 6 that feature vocals, and I really can’t wait until you hear them.
FW: Serious Sim is a fairly small team and your previous title, Radio Commander, was a pretty small title. Heading Out seems much more ambitious by comparison. How was that transition from an RTS game to a narrative racing game? It seems like a huge leap between genres, was that scary?
SA: It was scary and it was hard because like almost everything that is creative-based, Heading Out originally began life as something much simpler before it evolved into what we have today. It is almost always the case. Working with our publisher Saber gave us a lot of great feedback and great ideas. The development cycle took 3 years, so we had a good amount of time in-house to implement new ideas and it just continued to grow.
This is undoubtedly a giant leap for us. Radio Commander was something that felt like it was on out level at the time. Very soon after we started work on Heading Out, we realized that we had to level up in order to create something bigger. It still isn’t a AAA game, the heart of the game and its construction has an indie feel to it and technically I guess this is a AA title.
Personally, I feel that focusing too much on the budget of a game and allowing that to drive the development is stupid anyway. Although Heading Out isn’t as big as some AAA game, it was still a big jump for us, but I’m glad that we took the step to make it bigger.
FW: That makes a lot of sense considering that Heading Out takes so much of its influence from 1970s road movies, as they were often made on a shoestring budget. Even the more recent example of Drive was made for only $15 million.
SA: Drive is a great example of what we wanted to evoke. When Drive was marketed, it was sold to audiences as a heist movie akin to Fast and Furious. Obviously, it is not that at all. In hindsight, the trailer seems crazy when you look back at it. I fully agree that you can make a great road story without a giant budget. In the movie business, sometimes having a giant budget makes things worse because with more money comes more problems.
I believe that the myth of the road movie isn’t about bombastic special effect or crazy action scenes. If you watch something like Easy Rider or Vanishing Point, they are timeless. That searching for freedom, searching for your place on the road, running away from problems; these kinds of subjects are still resonating with audiences today.
Racing like a rogue
FW: Circling back to the roguelike elements of Heading Out, combined with the fact that it is a driving game, it puts me in mind of Pacific Drive.
SA: Yes, that comes up all the time.
FW: You are probably sick of hearing that comparison being made then.
SA: No, on the contrary, the reception of Pacific Drive actually gave us a lot of confidence when it came to releasing Heading Out.
FW: I guess that the difference is Pacific Drive is more of a simulation experience with regards to the realistic mechanics of maintaining and driving a car, whereas Heading Out seems to be more of an arcade experience. Would you consider that fair to say?
SA: I think that the thing that connects Heading Out to Pacific Drive more than anything is the fact that you are on the road getting familiar with your car through adventure. However, I think that our game character-driven in terms of its story.
Truly, we were very very happy to see the public reaction to Pacific Drive, because I have heard people say that playing Pacific Drive lead to them finding the trailer for Heading Out and now wanting to play our game. Although they are both unique experiences, they may scratch the same itch for some people and we are happy with that. Pacific Drive is an awesome game, so I’m stoked when that comparison is made.
FW: The sort of genre that we are discussing isn’t exactly a saturated market, so I actually feel like there will be a lot of gamers pleased to see another title in the same vein come along.
SA: Yes, and that is quite surprising also. As great as games like Burnout and Need for Speed are, it is fascinating that this genre hasn’t been pursued more. Who knows, maybe between Heading Out and Pacific Drive, we have birthed a fresh, new sub-genre.
Getting the opportunity to chat to Szymon Adamus was very insightful, it gave me a much better idea of what to expect when Heading Out releases. Alongside getting to chat with Szymon, I also got the opportunity to play a demo of the game, which features the first chapter. It is a very stylish game, and it is a lot of fun too. Hopefully it will be a title that we get to review on the site, but even if that wasn’t the case, this is still a game that I would definitely be picking up to check out.
