Interview "No One Is Doing Saturn" - How Parking Garage Rally Circuit Brings The Spirit Of Sega's 32-bit Console To PC

When we first heard about the upcoming PC game Parking Garage Rally Circuit, it stood out to us for two very simple reasons.

The first, of course, is its ridiculously fun premise, which sees its developer Tim Fitzrandolph (better known as Walaber) take the fast and furious world of rally racing and transplant it from private roads and beat-up dirt tracks to the confines of a series of claustrophobic parking garages. And the second is its extraordinary visual style, which tries to recreate the look of classic racers released for the Sega Saturn.

Typically, in the past, whenever we've seen new retro projects that are trying to evoke the visuals of old 3D consoles, they are more often than not paying tribute to platforms like the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64. So it's always nice to see modern developers try to break away from this trend and show the Sega Saturn some love for a change. It did get us wondering, though, about Fitzrandolph's own experiences of the console growing up, why he picked the Saturn over those other consoles, and the challenges of recreating the system's look with a modern toolset. So, recently, we reached out to Fitzrandolph to talk about his favourite Saturn game, the development of the project so far, and various other interesting topics.

He was able to share some excellent insights into his journey with the project so far and even teased the possibility of a homebrew version in the future if the game manages to sell well. You can check out our conversation with Fitzrandolph below (slightly edited and condensed for length and clarity):

Time Extension: Parking Garage Rally Circuit originally started life as a game jam project for Ludum Dare 54. Could you tell us more about that?

Fitzrandolph: Yeah, so I really, really, really like game jams. I just think they're great. I like two things about them. One is sometimes you can come up with a cool idea. Usually, because you have some kind of constraints. Game jams often have a theme or something that you have to deal with like 'Oh this is the low-res jam' or whatever. And the other is just that they're like a mini loop of the whole game development process. Like you come up with the idea, prototype it, build it, get play tests, like do all the sounds and audio and everything. So you get to practice the whole thing, which, if you make just like a game that takes two or three years at a time, you don't [typically] get many reps of.

Anyway, yeah, so this project originated at Ludum Dare 54 in 2023. And the theme was limited space. So usually what happens for me with Ludum Dare is I wait and find out what the theme is, and then I give myself like half a day on the first day to be like, 'Do I have a cool idea?' And if I do, then I'll participate in that round. And if I can't think of something great, then I'm just like, 'Okay, I'll participate next round.'

And so this one, I was like, 'Limited space? That's a cool theme. What's something that normally takes a lot of space that would be interesting or unique if you gave it less space?' And I don't know what led me to it other than maybe I've been seeing some other racing games people have been making, but I was like, 'Oh, well, race tracks are huge. You need a lot of space for a car race.' So I was like, 'Well, what would be a smaller venue? Oh, a parking garage is kind of interesting. A parking garage has a lot of ramps and stuff. So that kind of feels like rally racing.' And then, there you go. That was the idea.

It was instantly fully formed. You know, it was like, 'Yeah, let's race cars in a parking garage. That sounds amazing.' And that was a perfect idea for a game jam, where I could just make one parking garage and have you drive around in it with a timer.

It was instantly fully formed. You know, it was like, 'Yeah, let's race cars in a parking garage. That sounds amazing.' And that was a perfect idea for a game jam, where I could just make one parking garage and have you drive around in it with a timer. It would fit into the confines of trying to make a quick version. So it was fairly intuitive from that point.

Time Extension: And how did the retro visuals come about? Was that because of the limitation of the game jam environment? Or was it because you wanted to do something that was nostalgic and went back to the types of consoles you grew up with?

Fitzrandolph: It was a perfect storm. Obviously, at the game jam, I made the whole thing by myself. But during the game jam, I didn't have the specific idea of, 'Let's make it a Sega Saturn visual style'. I did make the game jam version kind of low-res. But if you look at it, it looks like, I don't know, maybe it could be trying to be a DS game or something. And that was more of a practical choice, just like, 'That'll give it at least a vibe. It'll look like it's on purpose. I can make everything really low-res really quickly.' I'm not a great 3D artist. So, you know, keeping things really simple is nice.

Then after that, it came out and the reaction was really positive to the game jam version. And I was just really happy with it. So I was like, 'Oh, this turned out really good. I just want to work on it more.' So then I started to switch to, 'Okay, if I'm going to make a game out of this and release it commercially, then I need to think a little bit about, how do I get people interested in the game, or what's the visual identity of the game? And if that can be strong, that's so valuable. If the game just kind of looks generic, or worst case, if I'm not a great 3D artist and it just looks kind of amateurish, then that's not good. So what can I do?'

So it was like, 'OK, maybe I should pick a specific system, like an older system that's kind of low-res and nostalgic.' And in my mind, I immediately go, 'Well, everyone's making PS1 games. What's the one no one's doing?' And I was like, 'Well, no one is doing Saturn.'

I've always had an affinity for the Saturn. Which is kind of weird, because I didn't have a Saturn when it came out. I had an N64. But the Saturn was always this enigmatic console. It didn't do that great in the US, where I grew up. And so I didn't encounter it very much. But I've since had two rounds now where I bought a Saturn and like got into it.

I've always had an affinity for the Saturn. Which is kind of weird, because I didn't have a Saturn when it originally came out. I had an N64. But the Saturn was always this enigmatic console to me. It didn't do that great in the US, where I grew up. And so I didn't encounter it very much. But I've since had two different rounds now where I bought a Saturn and like got really into it. One was in college and then the other one was fairly recently — now that I'm working on the game.

Time Extension: It would be interesting to hear — when you started to dig into the Saturn library, what were the games that jumped out to you?

Fitzrandolph: So, for me, there's always been one Saturn game that I always point to, where I'm like, 'This is the coolest game. No one ever talks about it', and that's Burning Rangers.

Burning Rangers is just this cool singular game that solves a lot of similar problems [that Mario 64 did]. It's a full 3D game. But I always loved how it was like a non-violent shooting game. Like you're running around putting out fires. You're not fighting enemies and you're not like this aggressive character. You're this helpful person with a really cool suit and you go around and save people who are stranded in these, like, space stations or whatever.

Also, I remember that the game was technically super impressive on the Saturn. It was the game people would bring up whenever someone was like, 'Oh, Saturn can't do this, Saturn can't do that.' They'd be like, 'Well, what about Burning Rangers?' And you'd go look at it. And it was doing all these things that supposedly the Saturn couldn't do. So I just always had a really strong attachment to it.

There are other games, of course. Like SEGA Rally, I remember and played, but I don't think I ever played the Saturn version. And Daytona USA was a similar kind of thing where I definitely played it in the arcade. I've since like watched these four or five-hour YouTube videos that are extremely detailed with interviews and everything. They're so cool to watch. I've like fallen into this mega Saturn rabbit hole lately after I decided I was going to make my game.

Time Extension: What sorts of tools have you been using to build the game and how have those tools come up against trying to replicate the Saturn's visual style?

Fitzrandolph: So there's one big thing after looking into it in more detail that I cannot properly recreate, which is that the Saturn was famously a bit more 2D-centric system. It had this concept of like, 'Everything's a sprite', but you could transform and warp sprites, and you could draw a tremendous amount of sprites compared to the systems before. And so what that means is that everything is a quad. It's like a rectangle with the image on it.

Well, I'm using Godot which is a modern normal kind of game engine that uses polygons and triangles for everything, and I'm also using Blender to make all the models. So I can't get around the fact that ultimately they're going to be triangles on the screen instead of quads. It would take a tremendous effort for me to fully simulate the actual way that those quads get warped and stuff. And so that part is simply not you know accurate or true to the Saturn.

That big issue aside, the rest of it's not too difficult to recreate. I mean, it starts very simply, which is I looked up what resolution the Saturn could render at — turns out there's a ton — and I make sure that all my UI and everything is literally that res. There's not like a weird, modern, high-res UI kind of floating on top of low-res visuals. My game truly is Sega Saturn Res. With some caveats of like, 'Well, people want to play in widescreen.' So if you go to widescreen, I invent a resolution that's kind of plausible but didn't exist at the time to give you a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and stuff like that.

The other big thing is transparency. So, basically, on the Saturn, it was notoriously difficult to do transparency. It was much easier to do on the PlayStation. And so, if you wanted to have like a translucent thing, the common solution was you draw it opaque, but you just draw every other pixel or some pattern of pixels, like a dithering pattern. So, it's either fully on or off, but because it's stippled like that, especially on the older monitors, that would kind of blur together anyway and it would look like kind of see-through. And so, I don't have a single semi-transparent thing in the game.

Like the shadow of the car is a black copy of the model squished down on the ground, but then only every other pixel is filled in. The tire tracks that the cars leave on the ground are the same way. All the particles and everything are all just pixels that are either on or off using a pattern. I don't know if it's 100% accurate to the exact patterns and stuff that they used on the Saturn. But very much restricting myself to that rule, I think, is probably the single strongest piece where you look at it and go, 'Oh, yeah, that doesn't look like a PlayStation game, it looks like a Saturn game.'

The shadow of the car is a black copy of the model squished down on the ground, but then only every other pixel is filled in. The tire tracks that the cars leave on the ground are the same way. All the particles and everything are all just pixels that are either on or off using a pattern.

Time Extension: How has the response been to the demo you released on Steam? The game seems like something that could potentially be quite popular with speedrunners. Have you already seen those kinds of players gravitate toward it?

Fitzrandolph: Yeah, I mean the game is definitely more fun if you care about trying to get a better time. You know, that's kind of the most compelling loop of the game, other than seeing the content and, you know, 'I wonder what the next track is'.

I think the demo did an okay job of this, but I have some revisions I should do because the way the game is structured right now is that you start and there are some trophy ghosts that are baked into the game. So there's like a gold car that represents the gold time and a silver car and a bronze car. And at first, you're just like, 'Oh, can I beat these ghosts'. And they're tied into the progression where if you beat the bronze ghost, you can go to the next track, but if you beat the gold ghost, then the game switches and starts pulling real ghosts from the leaderboard. And it does it where it looks at wherever you are in the leaderboard and picks the next three people right in front of you on the leaderboard. And then those are the ghosts that show up. So they should be achievable.

I'm really happy with that structure, but one thing I've seen from the demo is that some people aren't finding it. So what they'll do is they'll just beat the bronze and move on and then they'll be like 'I guess I'm done' because nothing's happened in the game to sort of indicate that there's this extra layer. So they never see the ghosts after that layer. I'm pretty sure I can make some tweaks to try and at least communicate that there's that [extra] layer to the game. Like maybe when you beat the gold on the results screen, it can kind of indicate that there are ghosts ready or something like that.

I love speedrunning in general. I mean Summer Games Done Quick is going on right now and I've constantly got it open in the tab and watching it and I've always wanted one of my games to end up in an event like that. Some developers may have a different attitude where they feel like 'You're breaking my game' or playing it in an unintended way or something. But I think it's amazing. People engaging with your game on such a deep level to try and find ways to sort of bend the rules you put in place of the game, I can't think of a higher compliment.

Time Extension: And how far along is the game at the moment? How much longer do you anticipate you've got left to work on it?

Fitzrandolph: I'm very far along at this point. I'm trying to keep the scope of the game reasonable, and the price will reflect that. You know, it's not a $60 game by any stretch, right? I don't think this concept would make sense [at that scale].

Recently, I was looking at Touge King The Spirits 2, which is a really cool Saturn racing game I bought for some reference. And you know, these Saturn games actually didn't have a tremendous amount of content in them. I think a lot of times maybe it was just because the expectations were different or because they were often arcade-style games or ports and meant to be played in short bursts.

But anyway, so it's the size of an actual Saturn game, which kind of works out for me because I think that's about the right size for the concept. You know, I don't know if you could have 100 parking garages and still think it was interesting on the 100th one. So eight tracks are planned, and basically, the main thing I need to do is finish the tracks. Most of the features of the game are basically done other than polishing and improving and getting feedback from playtesters and stuff. I'm hoping, if it all goes smoothly, that it'll be out in September this year.

Time Extension: You've already announced you will be releasing the game on PC (via Steam), but you've also mentioned that you are possibly considering porting the game to the two other platforms: Nintendo Switch and Sega Saturn. Could you tell us a little bit more about the Saturn port? How possible do you think it would be?

Fitzrandolph: I've been looking into it a little bit and Saturn homebrew is not the most huge scene with tons of amazing tools and stuff. But there are definitely people making 3D homebrew games that run on Saturn. So I'm pretty sure I could make some version of this game run on the Saturn, and that would be the funnest project I could think of to work on. But I can't spend that time unless, you know, financially it's not a terrible decision to do so.

So if it sells well enough on Steam, I will definitely make a Switch version. I think that makes perfect sense. And then if it sells really well, I want nothing more than to actually try and make a version that runs on the Saturn. A few years ago, I made an Atari 2600 game on a cartridge called Wall Jump Ninja. And I wrote that in assembly for the 2600, learning how they did it back in the day. I love that stuff. So I have been looking into it a little bit.