Wreckreation

Since the formation of Three Fields Entertainment in 2014, the plan was always to create a series of games where each title built upon the technology of the last. Dangerous Golf gave us experience with physics and destruction in Unreal Engine. The Danger Zone titles brought vehicles into the mix – first in contained, modular environments and then with Danger Zone 2, out on the open road. This allowed our tiny team to discover what it really took to build outdoor environments. Dangerous Driving was the next logical step: creating race events on closed circuits within natural landscapes.

As such, Wreckreation began its life in 2019 as Dangerous Driving 2. The goal was to take the driving experience into a full open world, along with all the massive challenges that brought to our small team of seven game makers.

Our first task was to figure out how to create an open world in Unreal Engine 4 that was as large as possible, yet detailed enough to handle precision physics between cars travelling at 100mph. From a design perspective, our philosophy was to create a network of fun roads first and then fit the landscape to them. We didn’t want to generate a random landscape and hope we could drape roads onto it later, as that usually compromises the driving experience. For me, that meant spending a lot of time in World Creator, developing a method to take the road network from the game and “grow” a landscape underneath it. This gave us our baseline, though it’s fair to say that many hundreds of hours of iteration, refinement, and re-modelling followed by artists far more talented than I.

In March 2020, we had our first public showing. After creating the Dangerous Driving 2 cover art, I travelled to PAX East in Boston to show our early work to the world. The week after we returned home, the world went insane and the lockdowns began.

I had already been working from home since leaving Electronic Arts/Criterion at the end of 2013, so I simply kept working while everyone else was seemingly busy making sourdough on furlough. My friends at Three Fields also worked from their home offices and spare bedrooms. Eventually, the decision was made to close our small office in Petersfield, Hants, as this new way of working proved to be a great success. We met up regularly inside the game itself to play and critique each other’s work. No PowerPoints and no Zoom calls – just being in the game together. After dreaming for years of this type of experience – of being inside the game as a team and critiquing it together, it felt like the future of game development had truly arrived.

I worked on a huge amount of presentation art, including the map, the in-game HUD, and more billboards, signs, and vehicle liveries than I care to remember. This meant living in Adobe Illustrator for weeks on end, creating high-detail textures that mimicked real-world graphics but with a healthy dollop of humour and obscure pop culture references. With games now running in 4K, there is always a chance someone will crash a lorry right in front of the camera, so I did my best to ensure every texture held up. Even the tiniest details usually contained a punchline, a movie reference, or a bad joke. To this day, I still can’t unsee the real-world liveries I parodied – I even spotted a mobile provider van in a sleepy Italian town recently that looked exactly like my version. They follow me everywhere!

During development, the project took a significant turn. During one of our daily play sessions, Alex (Ward) posed a question: could we spawn an object, like a ramp, directly into the game? That was the catalyst that changed everything. It elevated the project from a standard open-world driving game into something much more. Thanks to our genius trio of coders, “LiveMix” was born. This gave players the ability to remix the world in real-time, customising almost every element our ambitious team could think of.

For me, this meant experimenting with ways to reskin the presentation and exploring how to create personalisable objects. We wanted players to be able to make their mark on the world and create wild gameplay that we, as developers, could never have imagined.

A logical extension of this was creating objects for custom-built race tracks. This led me down a deep dive into the principles of slot-car racer toys, eventually designing a system of track pieces that allowed multiple players to build together cooperatively. We had to ensure that no matter where you were building, the tracks would always connect to form a complete circuit. This turned into a multi-year mission to push our track elements to the limit. I rebuilt the meshes several times and learned everything I could about rollercoaster design so players could create loops, Immelmanns, and Cobra rolls that soared hundreds of metres into the sky.

As the ambition grew, we decided to seek a partnership to allow development to continue at this scale. Three Fields partnered with THQ Nordic, and the game officially became “Wreckreation”.

While the world regained its sanity we forged on and in 2021, my wife Jayne and I looked to our plans for the future. We discovered that the many sacrifices we’d both made over the years had finally borne fruit. I particularly want to highlight Jayne’s role here; for over fifteen years, I worked and stayed away from home during the week, and it was Jayne who did the heavy lifting – working her own job while simultaneously raising our kids and keeping everything running. Her contribution to my being able to have this career cannot be understated. We realised that Jayne was in a position to retire, and so was I, should I choose to do so. Jayne retired and I let the guys at Three Fields know that although I was now in a position to stop, I wasn’t quite ready to put the tools down yet.

I continued in my role for the next two years, building, texturing, and prototyping. I had a wonderful time, supported by a Three Fields family that was incredibly warm-hearted and professional during a time when a lot of “life stuff” was happening in the background.

As 2023 began to close out, the steady realisation set in that there were so many other projects I wanted to pursue – fitness and health, prop and costume building, and various writing and painting projects (many of which exist outside of my “Simon Phipps Art” persona on this site). With not enough hours in the day and a desire to spend the time with Jayne that I’d missed out on during the “away” years, I made the decision to step away from full-time work and retire.

In December 2023, I set aside my mouse and keyboard. However, given the scope of Wreckreation, I spent the next 18 months helping out on a part-time basis to maintain the map and finish off specific features. Finally, in early 2025, I handed over my last files and returned to “civilian” life after almost four decades in the industry.

There is one final note to my career that I never could have anticipated when I first started as a Graphic Artist at Gremlin. My son, Ethan, grew up with a Gameboy in his hand and learned to read by playing Zelda with me. After graduating university, he became a coder at Free Radical, working as a Senior Programmer on the TimeSplitters project before that studio sadly closed. When Three Fields heard he was available, they recruited him.

I had the incredible privilege of finishing my career not only working on a killer project with a brilliant team, but doing so alongside my son. He is a much better coder than I will ever be, and while our lunchtime chats about Unreal Engine logic often made my head spin, those last two years working side-by-side were priceless. I can’t wait to see what the next generation of Phipps contributes to the legacy of video games.