Ashfall Rally: a first look at the season system
The mountain moves, so the stages move. Here is how we rebuild every route four times a year.
Ashfall Rally is set on a volcano that is still working, and we wanted that to be a mechanic rather than a backdrop. Every season, ash movement redraws the drivable surface: roads narrow, junctions close, and a corner you have taken a hundred times stops existing.
Technically this is a heightfield and a mask. The heightfield is authored once per mountain face; the mask is generated per season from a simulation we run offline, then hand-corrected by a designer, because a purely simulated route is fair and completely joyless.
The part we did not expect was what it does to the pace notes. Your co-driver reads the route from memory, and when the route changes, he is wrong. We kept that in. He gets a line or two behind, catches himself, and gets shorter with you. Several playtesters have apologised to him out loud.
Ashfall Rally comes to Steam and Nintendo Switch on 5 November 2026.