Take all the emotions you can squezze out of the motorcycle, put them in a Trackmania inspired epic track locations, add some fluency and gameplay dynamics of Wipeout, set it all in a  the world of future inspired by cyperpunk and make it a professional sport with violent rules that can only be matched by the ones of Rollerball.

Welcome to the world of the Rascal Rider game and graphic novel.

As a professional rider you will take part in a motorcycle racing series specially designed to entertain millions with its unforgiving and violent rules. Being on track you and all of your opponents will be allowed to use different kind of weaponry to claim your place at the finish line. From melee attacks to shooting rival riders in the back - everything is allowed. The high-tech protective suit and medical bots standing by the track will keep you in one piece during the race, as long as you can stand the pain of getting trashed over and over...

The basic gameplay mechanics will invole high speed motorcycle arcade racing combined with both ranged and melee combat. You primary weapon will be a front mounted, ranged weapon used to hunt your opponents and shoot them in the back during the race. This will mean that your riding skills will not only be used to go around the track as fast as possible, but also to both avoid and perform successful attacks. 

The second weapon type allowed during the Rascal Rider races are melee weapons. They will require even better riding skills and timing to perform a successful attack, which will make them even more spectacular and rewarding. 

The game will feature both single player and a cross-platform multiplayer modes. In both modes you will have a choice of allowing the use of the weapons with or without restrictions to create your preffered mix of racing and combat. You will be able to set up races based on the number of laps or on a specified amount of time, and all of this combined together will allow for a great variety of racing. With the handling model balancing between spectacularity and physics Rascal Rider gameplay provides fun and rewarding racing experience.

The initial release of the game will provide:

• 20 different motorcycles in many racing liveries
  
• both male and female characters
  
• large number of helmets and racing suits for customization
  
• a set of melee weapons ranging from morning star to front wheel lock
  
• a varied set of motorcycle front mounted weapons with different visual and audio effects
  
• 2 track configurations in the giant indoor arena
  
• 3 track configurations in high altitude mountain area
  
• 3 track configurations in the post industrial area
  

What we want to achieve with Rascal Rider is a fully cross-platform multiplayer experience. All the way up from 3D capable Android devices all of the Rascal Rider versions will be compatible in terms of gameplay. It is not easy, but we did our homework and we are very happy with the results so far.

Rascal Rider is an arcade racing game. Fast, simple and fun. And it's as good as simple it sounds. The simplicty of the basic gameplay mechanics allows us to fine tune the controls for many devices without loosing on gameplay quality. There is a reason why there aren't many cross-platform games on the market, but what we want to prove with Rascal Rider is that by choosing the right genre and the right mechanics, cross-platform multiplayer is a great opportunity. Just think of multiplayer PC gaming, the variety of input devices it mixes together, the variety of screen sizes and graphical capabilities of the used hardware. And now think of the cross-platform multiplayer again, and it doesn't sound so strange any more...

It does require extra effort to do it right. If you don't plan and design for a cross-platform gameplay from the very beginning, you may not be able to do it at all in the end. But we were aware of that, and we did plan and design Rascal Rider just for that. We have made that extra effort to make Rascal Rider a proper cross-platform game, because:

• we want to give everyone a chance to try and fall in love with Rascal rider no matter what their favourite platform is
• we want the players to be able to play their game on any platform they have the access to at the given moment
• we belive that building a large player base is just as much important as building a good game
• we like challanges :)

The game will be set in the world of the Rascal Rider graphic novel, which will be released in episodes, revealing piece by piece, a story of a lone man struggling to fit in the disturbing world of the future. The first episode, released as a poster and a motion comics trailer, reveals the events leading to the point where the main character "restarts" his racing carrer thus creating the game setting.

The reality the Rascal Rider takes place in is a strange place. We have set our racing series in a world that is undergoing a change. A change that is going to take it from what we could name a successfull futuristic society, with it's great achievements in medicine and technology, towards a dark cyberpunk era. An era of people overusing the powers they they have learned, but they do not know how they should use them. People who don't need to worry about things like safety, health or energy so they stopped thinking about it where does it all come from and why...

We are going to release the rest of the story in chapters available for download. As the chapters will not be released in the chronological order they will constantly switch focus between telling the story of the main character and explaining the world around him. Just as the story will be just a background for the races, the racing itself will not play the major part in the comics story. From peoples personal dilemmas to social problems of the futuristic society, that's what you can expect to be covered by the graphic novel.

We have spent the past year working on the Rascal Rider to make it ready to show you the idea behind the game. Rascal Rider is currently in the Pre-Alpha stage, which means that we have already tested most of the ideas and features for the game. We have the basics of the physics model, foundations of the combat mechanics and we have already tested the cross-platform multiplayer features.

Everything we did for the past year, from the first concept arts to AI prototyping, was done to make sure that Rascal Rider can look and play exactly like we want it to. There is still a lot of work ahead of us, but at this stage we are ready to share all of the ideas with you and to make some serious commitments.

What we are also ready for is to get you invloved in the development process. We have a strong vision of the Rascal Rider game, but that does not mean that we are the only guys in the world with good ideas.

Games are made for players, and their voice should be heard as soon as the development process allows it. And in our case, this moment is now.

Everyone who decides to pre-order the full game during this campaing will get access to the closed developmnet forums where we will all share the ideas and argue over them :)

Sharing ideas is one thing, but we also need your help in the testing process. We want to test Rascal Rider on as many devices as posssible, which is really important to us regarding the cross-platform multiplayer features. And running this tests will be a privilege of you, our supporting community.

But that is not all that we got prepared for you...

For those of you who are willing to show some more faith in us we have prepared some exclusive Rascal Rider collectibles. From hand signed postcards to huge limited edition posters, you can equip yourself with some unique stuff, that will not be available for purchase otherwise. Alongside these rare items you can also get the original soundtrack from the game, teased here with the Rascal Rider Main Theme:

Please have a good look at the perks on the right. There is a pretty good chance that you will find something just perfect for yourself. From securing your place in the game credits to becoming the legend. The choice is yours.

We are going to release the Rascal Rider in a sales model that is going to be something we could call "an indie free-to-play model". We are gamers as well, and we do also play some free-to-play games. As the multiplayer part of Rascal Rider is very important to us, we belive that the free-to-play model will work well for the game nad it's players. Sure there's a lot of things you can do wrong with a free-to-play game, but titles like League of Legends or Team Fortress 2 have shown that if done right, free-to-play is nothing to be afraid of.

To make things as clear as possible we are going to break it into 4 basic points:

1. you can basically play Rascal Rider for free, all the tracks and options will be always available for you to explore,
   
2. the items that will be available for purchase with real life money, including the exclusive ones, will never give you an advantage,
   
3. if you like the game you can always get the full content for the reasonable flat price, that will be $20 for all of the initial content, which basically equals buying the full game, 
   
4. any purchase you make will be valid for every platform you will log in from.
   

Some of you may ask about the DRM-free model. As the cross-platform multiplayer will be a very important part of the Rascal Rider experience it's hard for us to release it as DRM-free. We need to provide you with the account service to let you log in into the game, and we want to give you access to the same account from many platforms. But opposite to many free-to-play titles we are not going to restrict sharing or selling your account. The licence you get with your purchases will entitle you to fully manage this license just like you could do it with a physical disc.

cameleon-labs is an independent game developer, based in Poznan, Poland. We are a small studio that is free to follow its own ideas, and untied with any publisher we are ready to hear from the community in order to make our games richer and more fun to play. Rascal Rider is out first serious game project as a team in the current shape. 

Working on different stuff ranging from web aplications and database solutions for corporate clients to graphic tools and big scale game modding is how our team members got their experience (Object Painter video1, video2; S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Lost Alpha). And now we are going to put all of it together, combined with our creativty and passion, into making some kick-ass games for you, starting with the Rascal Rider.

Just like we said before, we belive that crowdfunding was invented for people who are ready to follow their passions and are working to put their ideas into live. If we were working for the big studios we wouldn't really need to be here. But we are a new indie studio, formed by people crazy enough to belive that you may actually like what we are doing, and you may want to get involved as well.

You can easily find us and the Rascal Rider project on the internet by simply following one of the links below:

cameleon-labs website - http://cameleon-labs.com

our Facebook Fan Page - https://www.facebook.com/cameleonlabs

Rascal Rider game website - http://rascalrider.com/

cameleon-labs Twitter profile - https://twitter.com/CameleonLabs

our YouTube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/CameleonLabs

Rascal Rider profile on IndieDB - http://www.indiedb.com/games/rascal-rider

The guys directly responsible for the Rascal Rider pre-alpha and this campaing are:

Adam Dera - game designer and project leader, and a 3D artist, and...

Dawid Niemiec - programmer, from AI to making sure that all of the pieces in the game world are in the right places, with all the right properties and scripts attached

Jakub Jatczak - programmer, the one you will love or hate, depending on the way your bike will handle that last turn

Pawel Pohland - programmer, one of the "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The Lost Alpha" team members, the one making sure that Rascal Rider will work as a piece of software in the end

Piotr Majkutewicz - 2D&3D artist, the man mainly responsible for the art style of the Rascal Rider

and

SoberDrunk - the musician, the composer and the sound engineer, our all-in-one audio solution.

There are also some other young and talented people that have been doing some artwork or coding during the pre-production stage, sharing their ideas and testing different solutions. And we would really like to work with some of them again.

So far we have been working on the Rascal Rider as a passion project. As fun at it can be, it becomes a bit hard to run such a serious game project without being able to focus on it completly. The funds we are rising right here will allow us to cover the expenses like:

• Unity Pro game engine licenses for the team
  
• a reasonable salary for the core team members 
  
• office bills
  
• assets costs, like audio recording sessions and high quality texturing assets
  
• a little bit of extra hardware that will make our work even more effective

What we are not going to spend money on are software licenses, as we are deep into using open source software, like Blender and GIMP, during the Rascal Rider development. 

Once we get a little bit closer to our initial goal, we will share our strech goals with you. These will require some further investments or simply more development time, but first we need to get this campaign up running...