Speed Limit: 0-60 in Two Years
I’m Igor Kolar, I’m the game director for Speed Limit. I’m an industrial designer by trade, visual communications designer often by necessity, and sometimes like to pretend I’m a pixel artist.
I did the initial design and art for Speed Limit before we were able to get more competent people on board to do those things, like our lead artist Jurica Cvetko and level designer Jan Juračić.
Nostalgia BaitI try to make the distinction between vintage and retro. Vintage is something genuinely old, for example, the games we’ve been inspired by are vintage, while Speed Limit a retro game, because it should remind you of those old games. Would that alone make it an homage though? It does in our press releases because it’s what people recognize and if it comes down to one word, that’s the best way to describe it. Like everything else we do at Gamechuck though, Speed Limit was always going to be something that’s learned from what we’ve perceived as the best practices, but without pretending progress didn’t happen. We took Speed Limit as far as we knew how with pixel art alone, but when we didn’t feel like it was quite enough, we used modern shaders and lighting effects to take it beyond that.
Like everything else we do at Gamechuck though, Speed Limit was always going to be something that’s learned from what we’ve perceived as the best practices
You could say I’m a fan of ‘retro’ games, there is compelling simplicity in their style, defined by either resolution or palette constraints. It’s the old story of constraints driving creativity. In general? Absolutely. I’m a big fan of things like air conditioning and anti-lock brakes, and would never go through the hassle of owning a vintage, say 1960s car with what I think is beautiful bodywork. I would however absolutely like to drive something that emulates that less aggressive styling of the period, the kind that reminds you that you’re allowed to like things that are fun.
Other times I find there is refinement in retro stuff that you don’t find elsewhere. When there isn’t much an object can do, more thought is put into whatever it can do. Like, if you don’t have the resources to make a complex 3D game, you can put your effort into making a compelling pixel art game with hand drawn animation where someone’s hair flies to the side when a bullet goes by their head.
Retro by (Good) Design
When it comes to the ‘retro’ of games, there are several aspects that have become scarce through shear industrialization of game creation. One of them is respecting player’s time.
I’m a big believer in making shorter, but stronger, memorable experiences, over those which disrespect your time. I like to think of Portal for this, a game which has roughly a three and a half hour play-through is the only one I remember playing that year. Whereas, the current industry-standard genre, the open world adventure game, has more than sixty hours, some of which is achieved through hunting useless trinkets, whether or not that makes sense story wise or not.
But on a smaller scale, the more epic a game is, the less it seems to want you to play it. Back in the Tomb Raider 2 era, I used to enjoy pre-rendered cut scenes, because I’m now as I was back then a big fan of well crafted 3D animation, but they were often, if not always skippable. Walk into a games show, after this virus calamity has passed, and find a game which doesn’t take 5-10 minutes to get going, outside of the indie booths. Our Gamechuck Arcade cabinet usually draws attention to itself when we’re presenting the game, but even without it, I think one of Speed Limit’s strengths is that you can just sit down and play.
I’m a big believer in making shorter, but stronger, memorable experiences
To that, I’d like to add the size of the game. Media files naturally take up the bulk of modern video games. Even our game, artificially constrained at a 640*360 resolution, bulked up significantly when our resident sound wizard Matija Malatistinić, added his awesome analogue synth soundtrack to it. From the music’s perspective, I’m glad we were able to give him as much time to craft something he, and then obviously everybody else was happy with. Even the rejected tracks are so good they should make their way into some kind of compilation if not a game more suited for their style. With the addition of music and sound effects, the game could still fit on a CD, and you’re not gonna spend a lot of time downloading it.
One thing that is coming back into fashion, at least judging by big companies trying to earn back some favour after countless workforce mismanagement blunders, are demos. Arguably, they never went out of fashion with smaller developers, earnest in their game design, and nurturing an actual craft, by trying to explore the medium beyond what we see in big budget games. We’ve learned a lot from people playing our demo, and with what’s available to us now in terms of downloadable content, our demo has evolved along with the game. Specifically, if you play the demo now, it will feature all the improvements we’ve added to the final game over the last year.
One thing that is coming back into fashion, at least judging by big companies trying to earn back some favour after countless workforce mismanagement blunders, are demos.
I still own a couple of big box releases, back from the stone age when CDs were a thing. Back then games didn’t just stack neatly between DVDs and Blu-rays, taking up instead a sizeable portion on a shelf, and sometimes infuriating store owners with their, at the time, non standardized but certainly creative shapes. Cradled inside, apart from the game was usually a number of other materials, like manuals and posters. It’s sad that this feeling of care that went into making all that, feels retro now. That’s why I’m happy that Speed Limit will have a physical release, even if it isn’t a big box one.
Where it all Began
The VERY EARLY Speed Limit character in 3D (made in year 2000)The VERY EARLY Speed Limit character in 3D (made in year 2000)
The concept of Speed Limit is an amalgamation of thinking about games which were available to me in the mid to late nineties, some early 3D titles, and some pixel art experience collected along the way. It probably has its roots, pun certainly intended, to discussing games while climbing trees with my friends as a kid. As a kid, before we could buy a computer in 1997, the only gaming that was available to me, was through my friends’ Sega Master System and what was already at the time a beat up 386 with CGA graphics (think pink and cyan). Consequentially, the kinds of games we could play on those, and their limitations, shaped a lot of what would later go into Speed Limit as “imagine if we could have done x, back then”.
For example, imagine if you could do a game where you can walk around, top down around town, but then if you get into a car, it becomes a sim like the early Test Drives. If you get into a jet, it becomes a flight sim like F-15 (II at the time, I think) and so on. This was years before GTA San Andreas would, roughly accomplish that, but it wouldn’t have been long before something like Earthworm Jim was out. The absurd humour, the very appealing visuals and varied gameplay were very compelling to me as a kid, and I still think it’s one of the most creative platformers out there.
Fast forward to 2012, and my student organisation, BEST, needs to promote a programming competition at a faculty where posters and fliers have utterly oversaturated the landscape. Alex, co-founder of Gamechuck leads the project, I do the design, and we get a programmer on board.
In a weekend, we build an arcade cabinet out of donated building materials and an old computer, and create a one button (a big, red, industrial, smash-resistant button) runner game (inspired by Canabalt) by Monday. This ends up being so much fun, that still 5 years later, I think: “what could we do if we had more than a weekend”. Whatever it is, due to current experience, it was clearly going to be pixel art, and it was going to be something that moves fast.
There is a particular thrill I think one gets from, let’s say things in motion. The trope of the train heist has been around for a long time, and I’ve always had this fondness for game levels which somehow emphasized motion. Super Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog (specifically for the Master System of course), would have nerve wrecking levels which would push you along at their pace instead of yours.
Metal Slug had you board a train, giving you a sensation of a high speed pursuit while you focus on the enemies on screen. Soldier of Fortune had a whole level on a moving train where you jump carriages to find a bomb. Final Fantasy 8 would have you run on a train roof while pre rendered background whizzed by. Earthworm Jim would have you fight a boss while in free-fall (and another on a bungee rope). Dark Forces 2 had you running around a spaceship that was falling, making the entire level tilt as you hurtle to meet the ground. For all the notoriety Lion King deservedly got (and the developers didn’t deserve), the Stampede was certainly an exciting level to me as a kid. These were my favourite kinds of levels growing up, and because I never learned programming, I never got to make a game that was just those kinds of thrill rides.
Setting the Stage
At around 2018 when Alex and I were wrapping up our first game, All You Can Eat, making Speed Limit the next easy, short project, seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea. The multi genre concept made a comeback, as did the idea of a game with ever faster vehicles. Looking back to where the ideas came from, it was clear this was going to be a 90s action movie. I didn’t want Speed Limit to be a reference vehicle for actual 90s movies however, I’ve played and enjoyed some games that did that too, and they were fine. No, this was going to be its own thing.
And one of these things was going to be playing with the aspect ratio. Even though we all now use 16:9 screens, there is still something that screams ‘movie’ when you have black bars on top and bottom. So, we used those black bars to both create this cinematic feeling and to give the illusion of depth by placing certain foreground items in front of those black bars, like the ramps in the train stage and bullet casings in the motorcycle stage.
Community
