*Racing games tend to come along in a few different varieties. There are those like **Mario Kart**, which are competitive party games, and those that are like **Gran Turismo**, a more intense experience for racing enthusiasts. Most racing games confine a user to a track, provide a mini map and have them go through the same tracks over and over again. *What if you weren’t tied down by gravity? What if you could choose your own path, not just through the streets, but over and around buildings, though the air and around your competitors like you were a byte of information bouncing through a circuitboard?* *With [**Lightfield**](http://bit.ly/2XVRS62), you can do just that.* [](http://bit.ly/2XVRS62) *Immersive soundtrack? Check. Gorgeous, rich textures and themed levels? Check. Super duper rad tricks, stunts, and twists? Check, check, and check! We got to chat with Simon Wallner from Lost in the Garden Games about this beauty of a game.*  **Tell us about your Development team. Are you an independent developer? Do you have a small crew of friends working together on your project?** We are a team of 4, evenly split between art and tech. We based in the lovely city of Vienna, Austria and, about three years ago, we founded our studio, Lost in the Garden as the place where we wanted to work together. *Lightfield* was our debut game also as a team, but we have known each other quite a bit longer before we started working together.  In the days before *Lightfield* we did quite a few things, from interactive applications, small games, big production movie VFX, graphic design, and art. Making games is kind of at the overlap of all those things, plus a little extra :D. I guess we all love games that carry some story in them, implicitly or explicitly. We like to explore in games and to experience the world and just be carried away. All of us played and enjoyed various *Zelda* titles, we also enjoy playing games together, and Simon also spent some time with the last *Gran Turismo *title playing multi hour endurance races… Being a full time developer and making games for a living also makes it harder for us to follow all the current games. As much as we would love to play games like* Red Dead Redemption*, or to really dive into any of the popular online games, there isn’t that much spare time left, to invest 50+ hours into some game. That maybe also means that to some degree, we are still somewhat influenced by the games we grew up with. For example, *Lightfield* is in some weird aspects much closer to the old *Tony Hawk* games than some other modern racing game.  **How did you come up with the idea for Lightfield?** It all started on a weekend, when we got together, and Matthias wanted to do a game like *Slipstream 5000*. It’s a flying/racing game from the mid 90s, but pretty soon our prototype diverged quite significantly from that game. You are still flying around and it’s a racing game, but I guess this is where the similarities end.  Weekend after weekend, we continued to work on the project and the gameplay and mechanics evolved more and more over time. We liked the concept, and people kinda liked what we made, so step by step we came closer to the point where we decided to really follow through with the project, apply for funding, start our studio, and shoot for the stars. **What is the *Lightfield* experience all about?** We are always trying to provide for many different play experiences. There shouldn’t be any ‘wrong way to play’ the game. If you don’t care about competing in races in *Lightfield* and just want to explore the environment, take a few pictures and just lose yourself in the visuals and music than that’s also perfectly fine for us. On the other hand if you care more about races, and time trial and leaderboards, and really perfecting your racing line, then this is also something we tried to cover in the game.  Overall I think *Lightfield* at its core provides a very new flying and racing mechanic that we haven’t seen in any other game before. Moving away from the familiar also makes it a bit harder for people to easily dive into and this is also a problem that we underestimated. Trying to innovate everywhere in a game might also result in big confusion for the players.  **What sort of programming resources did you use?** The game is developed in the Unity game engine with c# as the programming language. Unity is the perfect tool to get going quickly and many features are provided out of the box. On the other hand, the tools you use shape the final product and it was very important for us to have a very unique look and feel that did not look like a ‘Unity game’. We thus implemented a lot of things on our own, from our own shading and rendering, audio, shadows, the ships trails, and much more. The levels are all hand-crafted in Maya, and we also created our own content pipeline to be much more flexible in our workflow.  **What made you want to post the game on Kartridge?** We still have fond feelings for Kongregate and, when I was still in university, I probably spent way too many hours on the platform playing games instead of learning for math exams (somehow I still managed to get my degree though…) What we like about Kong and also Kartridge is that it really feels like a friendly and welcoming community. Gaming can feel like a shark tank at times, but we always felt welcomed here. Also on the dev side, with everyone we spoke to from the team we had the feeling that they genuinely care about the game and also the devs. We’ve been part of Kartridge from the start and getting the game onto the platform was relatively easy. Having everything in one place in the Kartridge app is quite convenient, and if there were any questions the team helped us out really quickly.  **Could you recommend one other game on Kartridge from another developer?** Let me pick something a bit out of the ordinary. I really enjoyed played *Little Inferno* back when it was originally released. It’s silly and quirky but it also has a weird and lovely backstory, and somehow setting things on fire in you little entertainment fireplace is quite fun :D  **Tell us something else interesting about yourself!** The first thing we bought for our studio, even before we had our office, was a decent Italian espresso machine. We all love good espresso, and we also claim to be the indie studio in Vienna that makes the best coffee. You can find [**Lightfield** on Kartridge](http://bit.ly/2XVRS62) for $11.99, including 4 badges worth 310 total XP! Follow Lost in the Garden Games at their [website](http://lostinthegarden.com/) and on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/playinthegarden?lang=en)!

I got this game and it looked like a pretty good racing game. It took a bit too much capacity than my system was willing to dish out, so it was a bit too laggy to play for me (I have an older computer). But the videos of the game are pretty indicative of what you see in the game. The fact that it is a true 3D game (where you can not only move in in any direction but also orient in any direction) really made this a unique racing game imo. Happy gaming, Pip ------------------------ [Download Kartridge](https://www.kartridge.com/download?referral=7c31f044-e2b2-414f-b258-489bddce85fe) now to earn a special Kongpanion and 10 Kreds on Kongregate. This link will even get you an additional 15% off coupon that you can use to purchase Lightfield!