Devlog #4 — Cars that open, cars that die, and doors you can steal

We spent this round on everything that happens to a car before and after you get behind the wheel. Doors, bonnets and boots now open on all 13 cars. Cars need real engine parts before they'll start. Some of them spawn as wrecks instead of working vehicles, with doors on the ground and glass smashed out. And if you find a loose door, you can carry it to a different car and bolt it on. None of this is a tech demo — it's compiled, placed, and tested in the project right now.

Exhaust, brake lights, and names

Cars now puff exhaust smoke while driving — from the tailpipe on the modular pack's cars, from under the rear bumper on the older post-apocalyptic five. Brake lights and indicators work on the cars whose lamps support them: press the left or right arrow for a blinking indicator, down for hazards, and tapping the brake lights the rear lamps red. Every car also shows its own proper name in the "Get In" prompt now — Hatchback, Ute, 4WD, Tray Ute, and so on — instead of a generic label.

One honest trade-off here: fixing a visual bug on the older five cars (floating orange and red light chips that looked wrong up close) meant switching off their generated lamp boxes entirely. Those five cars no longer have working brake or indicator glow. The modular-pack cars keep theirs.

Every door, bonnet, and boot opens

All 13 cars now have working doors, bonnets, and boots. Look at the lower half of a door, or at a bonnet or boot, and you get a prompt with the part's name and "E Open" — press it again to close. Getting in or out now copies the timing of Narrative's own demo car: press E to get in and the door waits about a second, then swings open over roughly a second, holds, and swings shut behind you. Getting out is slower on the way open and snaps shut quicker. It's a small thing, but it's the difference between a door that feels designed and one that just flaps.

Cars need an engine to run

Open the bonnet and you'll find an engine bay with storage space — eight slots on the modular cars, the same system tucked under the bonnet on the older five. Every car needs its engine parts in that bay to actually drive: pull out the battery, spark plugs, or fuel pump and the car goes dead — it'll still steer and roll if pushed, but there's no power. Put the part back and it starts again. Those same parts — Car Battery, Spark Plugs, Fuel Pump — now turn up in loot crates around the map, so finding a working car is partly about finding the right spares to go with it. They're using placeholder art for now (the same generic battery icon on all three), but the system underneath is real and saves correctly.

Wrecks: some cars are already dead

Not every car you find is going to drive. Roughly seven in ten spawn as wrecks — missing or locked parts, sitting upright, on their side, or flipped onto the roof, with doors sometimes lying on the ground nearby and glass smashed out of the windows. The look is rolled once per car by the server and saved with it, so a wreck stays a wreck (and a fixed one stays fixed) between sessions. We also went back and cleaned up the early version: a car resting on its side now sits on its body panel instead of balancing awkwardly on a side mirror, doors lying on the ground sit flat and closer to the car rather than scattered wide, and the debris field around a wreck is tighter and won't spawn on top of the parts you're trying to reach.

A flipped wreck can't be driven and can't be pushed back over by walking into it yet — flipping a car back upright is on the list but not built. Its doors, boot, and engine bay still open normally even upside down.

Pick up a door, fit it to a different car

If you find a door lying on the ground near a wreck, you can pick it up — it goes straight into your inventory and disappears from the ground. Stand near an empty door frame on any car and a translucent blue preview shows exactly where it'll snap in; press E and it's fitted, taking on that car's paint colour (so a sedan's grey door turns blue on a hatchback, for example). This works from a car that's missing a door hole, and the same action is also available by right-clicking the door in your inventory while standing near the hole. We tested this with two players — one picked up a door, both watched it vanish from the ground and land in the right inventory, then watched it get fitted and painted correctly. It only works one direction for now: you can't pull a door off a car that still has one.

Moss that stays put

The modular pack's cars got a moss layer a few rounds back, but it kept causing problems. First it was tuned too light and barely visible under the dirt and noise layered on top, so we retuned it stronger. Then it started flickering and vanishing entirely whenever you looked straight at a car, because the same game system that highlights an object you're interacting with was overwriting the moss layer underneath it. The fix was to build the moss into the car's paint itself, the same way the older five cars already handle their grime — no separate layer to get overwritten. It also now grows on whatever surface faces up, so a car flipped onto its roof has moss on its underside instead of on the roof sitting against the ground. While we were in there, we also locked the older cars' grime pattern to the car body — it used to visibly slide across the paint as the car moved, which looked wrong the moment you drove one.

Smaller fixes

The station wagon (and cars generally) used to look noticeably lower-detail the moment you got close to one — they're now using their full-detail model at close range instead of a simplified stand-in. Separately, the get-in climb animation now actually plays before the camera cuts to the driver's seat; it had been getting skipped entirely because the test map was missing the navigation data the animation system needs to find a path to the seat. That's confirmed working in our test map — the main map doesn't have that navigation data built yet, so get-in there still snaps straight to the seat until that's added.

What's next

Car damage and fuel consumption, deployables you can place straight from the hotbar, the recycler station actually recycling things, and an action to flip an overturned wreck back onto its wheels.

More soon.