The story so far

I'm going to attempt to explain a lot in this blog post, which will hopefully give everyone a clear picture of where we've come from and where we're headed with iGP. If you're just here to find out about what to expect in the months ahead, scroll to the last section labelled 'Future developments'. For anyone interested in knowing the whole story behind iGP and how we got here, I'm going to attempt to cover most of that too, in condensed form. The uncut version would read better as a book.

Who is behind iGP and how it began

iGP was and is developed by me (Jack Basford) and Andrew Wiseman. Not iRacing, not InsideSimRacing or any of our current partner organisations. We are two programmers with limited history in this industry and we haven't come from another games development studio or software house.

I met Andrew (the developer of the iGP simulator) a long time ago, and we agreed that it made sense to do something together, some day, with our complimentary skillsets. That day arrived in 2009, but first some background on how it came about...

Before starting iGP, I was becoming disgruntled with freelance work building websites and brands for clients. Having also built a CMS (Content Management System) of my own and developed my3id.com and the My3id Gaming team with it, the belief was always there that I could skip the middle man and set up a business.

I'd also just come off the back of putting a year in to a racing driver talent search called V1 Championship. The championship was originally supposed to be televised on ITV4, but it concluded around the time ITV sold the F1 broadcasting rights to the BBC in the UK. The advertising money and the promised prize of a season in Formula BMW evaporated with it. It was a big setback for me, because I'd won the championship and was on track to secure the drive up to that point. But it made me realise that if we want something, we have to go and get it. This gave me the final push needed to set up a business and pursue more creative work.

Andrew had just finished university, and is a more private individual, so I won't go in to much detail. But he had just finished studying AI at university around the same time. We crossed paths after a long time (perhaps years?) apart, and I suggested creating an F1 Manager game together. I could build a web-game and do all the branding, and he could use his technical skills to build a simulator. We both liked the idea and it practically started on a whim. But we also realised how much we didn't know, and that there would be a long road ahead that would require us to learn on the job.

Building iGP (pre-launch)

Andrew brought significant technical ability to the table and I brought creativity paired with a fair amount of technical knowledge. But neither of us had experience in business, and I didn't even have experience building games. If we had realised at this point how big the challenge was going to be, we might have thought better of it; but fuelled by naive ambition we set out on this path. To give you an idea of the scale of that naive ambition, we started out with the intention that Andrew would build a fully-3D viewer using the OGRE rendering engine, with graphics comparable to racing games.

Starting with what I knew, I built a completely new CMS and library from which the project (and any future online business) could be built. Then iGP Manager  (the web-game) was built on top of that as an extension. With experience in 3D modelling from my years as a freelancer, I also made the iGP car which is used today in the livery builder tool.

There was a third party involved for several months, who brought investment and business experience. We eventually decided to part ways because he was never able to get his teeth in to the project, it was all coding and very little business at this time. This complicated things and set back development. It also put the final nail in the coffin for the 3D viewer, because instead of having investment we now had to buy his shares back.

Once we refocused our efforts on developing a 2D viewer we started to make good progress. I developed track maps in Photoshop and Andrew would make the cars to go around them. A couple of years had passed already to get this far, but we were finally ready to ramp up to a public launch.

Order out of chaos

After launch we were pleased with the initial stability of the game, and the workload was manageable, for a little while. But as iGP grew in popularity, the two of us struggled to meet the demands. At this time all communications, the helpdesk, transactions & refunds, law & finance were being handled solely by me and Andrew. Every time we had to write terms of service or a contract we would spend days researching how to write it. Not to mention how far things were thrown off whenever the sim crashed. Andrew also had to take up part-time work at another company.

At this time, there were moments (sometimes weeks) when iGP was just me frantically doing the work of five or six people. Somehow we came through this phase unscathed, but it's only thanks to a lot of long days and even longer nights. I remember working 20 hour days for 5 days in a row, only getting 3 hours sleep each night. And practically the only thing I would find the next day would be more problems than I'd resolved the day before. Andrew was frequently doing all-nighters to make up for lost time. Without bags of money to throw at problems, the only thing we had to throw at them was our time. It's our own doing of course, and not unusual starting out in business, so I understand if anyone reading this isn't sympathetic.

But it puts a lot of things in to context, like why we stopped emphasising constantly releasing new features and updates. We soon realised that the only way to achieve that was to establish a legitimate business and platform around which growth is sustainable. We couldn't keep going on as a double-act, it was time to acknowledge the scale of the challenge and bring in assistance.

I'm very pleased to say we're now getting to the stage where we have that. We have an accounting firm, a server management team, consultants for advice when we need it and have even hired a third developer recently: Rob Gordon. Steve Myers from iRacing joined us and has brought years of invaluable industry experience and wisdom. Aaron has been excellent for the helpdesk, as have all of the moderators for the forum. The contributions of all of these organisations and individuals are making it possible for us to finally start realising the potential of iGP.

Current developments

Now that we have some capacity to focus on development, it has still been focused on things which improve the efficiency of our operation, and removing unnecessary clutter from the working processes. We want to get to a stage where the production line flows effortlessly and without interruption. Once we get there, the emphasis will switch back to game updates.

I have been working on sophisticated admin controls that let us track the behaviour of users in iGP, so we can start to tailor the experience around how you play the game in future updates. And I have been working on giving as many tools and guides as possible to our helpdesk staff and moderators, to enable them to do their job without the need to ask me or Andrew for assistance, which traditionally was a big drain on our time. These are all important developments.

Andrew has been tirelessly working on improving the stability of the simulator to ensure that situations where it crashes are so rare that it is negligible. In the past that has been a big stumbling block for progress, but it's something he's now getting on top of. He also worked to establish a partnership with CloudWays server management, who will ensure the stability and uptime of our servers. The architecture of the simulator was also changed a few months back, to operate on its own distinct server, breaking away from the website(s) server. Far from being a case of just moving it across, that required a lot of code to be rewritten. These were all highly significant developments in order to allow sustainable growth and uptime of the service.

Alongside these big projects, we have tried to add new features to the game when we can. A few months ago sound was added, and we've also added a few more reward points options and bugfixes (e.g. I recently improved mail inbox efficiency quite dramatically). Not to mention the upcoming free viewer update which was built in response to much of your feedback.

Future developments

Now for the juicy stuff I suspect most of you really wanted to know about... We're almost at the stage where we can focus most of our energy back to development. This is when we will be able to finish the design system update.

There are also plans to add new features and tournaments to iGP which should spice things up a bit. For one, we'll be setting up a pinnacle league with the top managers from the hall of fame, where they can play for prizes and earn the title of top manager in iGP outright.

Now that the free viewer has been brought up a peg or two, we'll be emphasising more new developments that benefit subscribers in the year ahead. Something I'm particularly looking forward to adding is a friendly race system, which will allow managers to race any time against anyone in iGP outside of the league system. Groups of friends that are separated by leagues or tiers will be able to come together to race, with balancing options to ensure it is a fair fight. The iGP websites (but not the 2D viewer) will also become compatible with mobile devices, and the public website has been completely redesigned for the next major update with the design system.

As of yet, we are unsure of whether we will be able to port the current 2D viewer to be compatible with mobile devices, but it something we are actively pursuing and want to achieve. We recognise iGP is well suited to the mobile platform and when people can both prepare for a race and take part on the move it will open up a new avenue of possibilities.

There are more developments that we will be pursuing, but I don't want to promise anything until a decision has been reached.

Wrap-up

Hopefully this lengthy blog has explained a lot of things that I see people are unsure about. From who developed iGP and how it started, to what the future holds and what we're currently working on. The confusion has been caused by the lack of information released, and we'll do more to keep you in the loop in future too.

The last year wasn't all it promised to be, because we underestimated the challenges of being in business, it's not just programming, which was all we knew before. But we understand what is involved better than ever now, and we've got a great group of people around us making it all happen. Not to mention you, the people who play iGP, without you none of this would be possible. Thank you.