Three Months In: Can You Build a Car Scene Faster Than a Game Can Lose One?
by Khi
Horizon Club Scene is three months old.
There are 125 people on the website and 115 in the Discord now. That’s not as many as I’d hoped we’d have by this point, if I’m being transparent. The game isn’t brand new anymore, the launch rush is wearing off, people are inevitably moving on to other things, and getting HCS in front of the specific kind of person who would actually get it continues to be the most difficult part of it all.
Though, when I think about what we’ve actually done in three months… it’s pretty amazing.
When I started HCS, there was a clear goal. I missed the stuff that used to exist around car culture… forums, build threads, local clubs, meet photos, rivalries, named cars, reputations. You’d see the same usernames every day and eventually know who drove what, who was fast, who built weird stuff, who took great pictures, who knew everything about suspension, whatever.
Forza already gives us an absolutely ridiculous automotive sandbox. The cars, tuning, liveries, photography, EventLab, racing and this enormous map are all there. What I wanted to build was the stuff around it that gives those things some permanence.
Three months later, I think we’re actually getting there.
Wangan Wednesday is somehow at Volume 14
Last week was doing Vipers and Vettes. Before that was week was Cop Night. Before that we had everybody bring white cars into the mountains for Byakuya. We’ve done rally nights, German cars, the Festival of Speed, mountain drives, photo meets and plenty of regular old cruises where we mostly just drove around and shot the breeze.
At some point I started making a little sticker for every Wangan Wednesday and putting them on the side of my Acty. Now the thing is slowly getting covered in them.
There’s no system behind that. No points. No achievement. I just thought it would be funny, and now looking at the side of that truck is basically looking at a little history of the community.
That’s the vibe.
Project Pursuit has been another one
This started with a hidden time suggestion from Hippo, and then me recalling Trackmania Weekly Shorts and thinking about how well that basic format would work here. A pack of short community-made tracks, multiple disciplines, run them as much as you want all week.
Except you can’t see anybody else’s time.
You know what you ran, and where you are in the pack… but you don’t know whether you need another tenth or another ten seconds to take the lead. Saturday comes around, everything gets revealed, and we find out what everybody was actually chasing.
There’s a crown on the discord/site that gets passed to whoever wins. If you want to keep it, you have to defend it the next week. People are submitting their own EventLab courses for the track packs, learning how to make better short-form stages and grinding other people’s tracks looking for another couple tenths.
None of that existed a few weeks ago. Now we have a king who gets to spend the week wondering if they are still the king.
Hippo just had the first successful crown hold. Two weeks in a row!! Dynasty incoming? Time will tell…
We’re racing now, too
HCS Racing Leagues just launched, and this is probably one of the better signs that the community is starting to become its own thing.
I’m starting Tanren Works, which is my particular flavor of circuit racing: controlled car builds, open tuning, no assists, full simulation damage, required pit stops, practice before the race and stewarded penalties.
But ALSO, Sassy has created his own league, Endless Appeal Grassroots Racing, focused on C/B-class racing around short tracks.
That’s important to me because I didn’t make it.
Someone had an idea for something they wanted to do, and now there’s infrastructure sitting there that lets them turn it into an actual championship for everybody else.
That’s increasingly what I’m trying to do with the site. I don’t want HCS to depend on me coming up with something entertaining every week. I want somebody to have a stupid idea at 11 PM and have somewhere to turn it into everybody else’s problem.
Build a track? Let’s race it. Build a car you’re weirdly attached to? Put it in your garage and give it a name. Start a club? Represent it. Take a ridiculous photo? Enter it in a contest. Think you found a faster way up a mountain? There’s a record for that.
And apparently now, if you think your club owns that mountain, I’m building something for that too.
King of the Mountain
This isn’t quite live yet, but it’s what I’m working on now, and it’s probably the most Initial D bs I’ve attempted so far.
I’m dividing the mountains around the FH6 map into territories. They’re actual vector areas on the HCS map, and clubs will be able to own them by being the fastest there.
If your club owns a mountain, that territory changes to your club color and your logo gets planted on the map. Your club gets to decide which race represents your mountain, and everybody else can come try to break your record. There will also be direct 1v1 battles as this gets built out, because obviously there have to be.
I’m basically using the mountains as an analogue for prefectures. Different clubs, different territory, different home roads.
And this is probably the clearest example yet of what I’ve been trying to do with HCS.
Forza gives us a mountain. It’s fun to drive. It’s beautiful. We run up and down it a bunch of times, and eventually it’s just another road we’ve driven before.
But what if everybody knows that mountain belongs to a particular club?
What if they’ve held it for six weeks? What if their fastest guy has a completely stupid record there that nobody can touch? What if another club spends an entire night trying to find three tenths, finally gets it, and the next time you open the HCS map the whole mountain has changed colors?
Now the road has some history. That’s what I want.
I think I understand what I’m building a little better now.
Three months ago I would have said I was building features for a car community. I think what I’m actually doing is building reasons for things in the game to matter to us.
A leaderboard doesn’t mean much until you recognize the name above yours. A club is mostly just some a name until another club has something you want. A photo gallery is image hosting until you start recognizing the photographer. A car is one of hundreds in your garage until you’ve named the damn thing, written down its story and other people know it when you pull into a meet.
A mountain is just part of the map until somebody says, “That’s ours.”
That’s basically the whole experiment now: take all of these disconnected things Forza lets us do and give them somewhere to connect. Your cars, builds, photos, tracks, clubs, races, records and reputation shouldn’t disappear the second you leave the lobby.
Even the dumb little cruise stickers count.
So yeah. 125 people.
I want that number to be bigger. Of course I do.
I’d love to write the six-month version of this with 500 people here. I’d love for more people to find HCS before they get bored with the game and move on. I still think there are a ton of people playing Forza who would immediately understand what we’re doing if I could just get the thing in front of them.
But I also don’t want to spend so much time staring at the member count that I miss what’s happening with the people who already found us.
Three months ago none of this existed. Now I know who I’m chasing in Project Pursuit. I recognize people’s cars. Clubs are developing their own identities. People are building tracks specifically for other members to attack. Somebody started a racing league because they wanted a different kind of racing than the type we are used to. Wednesday night has somehow become a standing appointment, and my HCS Acty is running out of bodywork for stickers.
Soon I’m going to open our map and see club logos planted across different mountains because a bunch of grown adults have decided that imaginary Japanese mountain territory is worth fighting over.
I think that’s fucking awesome.
I still have no idea how big HCS gets, and I’m very much still making this up as I go. But after three months, I think the original idea has at least proven itself.
Here’s to the next three!