I’m Dariusz, founder of Pixel Perfect Dude and co-creator of #DRIVE. I was a solo dev for around 10 years and decided to try to build a studio on the game’s reception. You might say I’m currently the Creative Director.
The #DRIVE brand has a very strong identity. What was the hardest thing to change without breaking that identity?
The first #DRIVE is a simple mobile endless driving game where players can chill and have fun. Racing on PC is mostly very competitive and aiming for at least simcade. We wanted to keep the fun part but also make the cars look good and the way they behave believable. I guess that was the toughest part and that’s why we did the recent update with new physics.
#DRIVE Rally sits between arcade and sim. How did you decide where to draw the line on realism?
I would say it’s more of an arcade racer really. At least under the hood. As I mentioned before, we wanted to make the cars look like real cars while driving, not like just a random box sliding around the track. So the goal was always to do an arcade racer, also because of the style that we got in #DRIVE.
How did you approach progression? Is the focus more on player mastery or on unlocking content?
A little bit of both but the main goal in rally is to get the best times. That’s why while doing Championships you slowly move to faster cars and longer, more difficult stages. And then you can compete with other players while racing their ghosts.
As an indie team, what was the most painful compromise you had to accept during development?
That we won’t be able to do any type of multiplayer. We didn’t have any experience and we didn’t have the budget to learn while developing this game.
With unlimited time and budget, what feature would you add immediately?
I would probably go with rallycross and multiplayer. We got cross-platform leaderboards, we got ghosts, but it’s always cool to race with other players realtime.
How would you describe Pixel Perfect Dude today compared to when you shipped the first #DRIVE?
Well, we kinda did a full 360 unfortunately. Both #DRIVE and #DRIVE Rally are far from being a commercial success. We’ve self-published #DRIVE Rally on Steam and it was the first game for us for PC. There were definitely some mistakes on our side but both Steam and the players were ruthless, we got buried and now we hardly get any sales. We got the content ready for 2026, we almost got the console porting done, but there’s only 2 of us left at the moment, not even full time. So we’re kinda starting from the beginning. If we survive 2026…
