It was dark and cold on a moonless night. I was enjoying some fruit juice on the balcony when I saw something.
Something disturbing.
Up in the sky, two dots of light, that I took for stars until now, started moving. They were bright as the sun and moved in arabesques until, at the exact moment I finished my drink, they charged right at me.
I braced for my life, but against all odds, the lights stopped. And I noticed there was something behind those lights: yes, it was a golf cart! And piloted by no more than two Allosauruses in cotton coats!
As I slowly backed up to my apartment, remembering the famous words of Pr. Alan Grant, they stopped right in front of me and made what I assumed was a smile.
"Hello Human", the driver said.
"Take this. You will thank us later.", he continued as he handed me a document.
By the time I understood what struck me, they were gone. On the first page of the document was written in claw writing:
"WHEELLESS"
I'm 99% sure it was exactly what happened.
Actually, the real story behind the concept of Wheelless is a little less romantic.
Extreme G was one of my first game when I was a kid, or at least one of the games that I played the most. But that one game didn't motivated me to make Wheelless, it is more of a design and feel inspiration; in fact it was just a 'random' anime I watched back around september 2015: Space Dandy [S01 E07], when Dandy participates at the Magellan Grand Prix.
I found the concept really cool: a race in the void on millions of millions of kilometers, around entire planets, navigating in hyperspace, making tight turns around asteroids, drifting through a black hole!
Out of boredom I started prototyping a 2D Unity game similar to what I watched, with touch controls in mind (for Mobile devices). I even made a placeholder Dandy spaceship for testing!
Of course back then, I didn't thought about this project as a real thing, I just enjoyed working on a gameplay prototype solely for fun like the others one I made earlier (I made a 2D metroid, 3D metroid prime-like, 3D Zelda-like, Splatoon-like and some more prototypes during the previous years).
The prototype looked like poop back thenWell, as I worked on the prototype, I started doing some game design document works, plans for gameplay, level designs, campain ideas, etc. And before I really understood what happened, the project growed so much I just couldn't stop where I was (it was just around november).
I worked on hyperspace too. Will be in Alpha 2.0!At this moment I started talking about this project to my old pal Yuubae. We talked design for an entire night on the phone, and after this he joined me to do some spaceship & circuit designs and also a scenario for the campain (which at this time was only a text at the beggining and ending of an arcady campain, just like the one in Streetfighter), so I could concentrate more in the development and be less preocupated by designs. (Well, I still work the Game Design, just not the graphical designs).
There was some funny bugs (but most of them were not fun at all)And... that's it!
No overthinking, no debates or brainstorms, no commercial or marketing plans: just a random anime that gave me inspiration, and too much time invested in the project to give up.
Yep, that's doesn't sound impressive at all. Actually, if you could take an advice from that story:
Don't go blind in a project. At least make something out of what you loved as a kid, something that makes your eyes shine thinking about it!
So that was my first blog post, I thought you would want to know how we got here. Mainly because we're filled with Determination!
Thank you for reading!
