Powered by LootLocker: How Robin went from Mad Max mods to creating his own motoring mayhem game

Robin from Nethash used LootLocker to help create Rust Racers – a game he says is “Mad Max, making tender love to Rocket League, while Fortnite watches from the closet”. Before using Lootlocker, Nethash were trying to build everything from scratch, with a tiny team.

Looking for a way out of development limbo

Robin had a vision for his full debut as a developer: a massively multiplayer, car-crushing vehicle combat game, set in a cyberpunk dystopian future. He had thousands of hours of practice, creating popular mods like Gmod Mad Max for games like Garry’s Mod.

But it was proving a bigger task than expected. Robin and his five-person team spent years trying to build every aspect of the game themselves.

This is a problem we see a lot: a hot new developer with so much passion and creativity, that they want to make every aspect of their game unique. Developer Robin stated this on their dev-blog: “We were spending all our time making an engine instead of making a game.”

Eventually they settled on Unreal Engine 5 and started making good progress. But they’d also planned to build their own backend service. When this also proved to be too much work for such a small team, they realized they needed something scalable and flexible enough to take the work off their hands.

The perilous path from hobbyist modder to pro developer

Robin’s struggles weren’t for any lack of passion or talent. He started programming aged 15, and spent over a decade building a community around his creations in Garry’s Mod.

His expertise came entirely from practice, rather than theory. He says he was terrible at math in school, but through making games, he quickly learned his way around geometry, trigonometry and algebra. As Robin says: “if you do something you enjoy long enough, eventually you get good at it”.

When his Mad Max-inspired mods proved popular, Robin knew he had what it takes to develop his own title from the ground up. He now runs Nethash from the icy landscape of northern Sweden.

Helping a tiny team to achieve big things

It took Robin just one weekend of testing to decide that LootLocker was the backend tool he needed to make Rust Racers a reality. He signed up as a LootLocker power user – basically taking advantage of every feature we have.

Rust Racers uses our white-label login and player management system, assets, leaderboards, progression…the lot. Robin’s team manage all their vehicles, armor, upgrades, abilities, and unlocks through our asset system – so they can quickly and easily manage, update, or add new content on the fly. LootLocker has even proved flexible enough to use in edge-cases that are specific to Rust Racers.

It only took a few days for Nethash to get started with LootLocker. And then, over time, they connected the rest of the game’s features to our backend-as-a-service. Robin hopes to use LootLocker’s cross-platform and social features to allow players to battle each other across all platforms.

We’re looking forward to playing Rust Racers

Who doesn’t love a bit of high-speed fender bending? Rust Racers should be out as a closed alpha test soon, so keep an eye out for it.

If you want to find out more and stay up to date on the game’s development, you can find their game on Steam.

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