We've delivered our game design document
A year ago, we've been extremely lucky to receive a grant from the CNC (French National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image) to work on a game design document for The Wind through the Wheels. We finalized it last month and we are quite happy with the progress we've made on defining the game, both in story, design and game mechanics.
If you wish to consult it, it is available here but only in french (and as this is the first game design document we've written, we are uncertain of its quality, so let's hope it's correct).
At first the game was intended to be entirely done in ASCII art but during the GDD writing, we switched to a misc-text mode style close to PETSCII using the Textor engine I'm working on. ASCII surely was very cool but I think colored text mode will allow more expressiveness and cool animation style (like the previous cycling animation I posted). Here a a mock-up for the riding screen, including landscape parallax scrolling and dialogue between characters between road events and getting to destination.
Without yet having reworked the prototype we have for this type of view with these new graphics, here the animated sprite of a cyclist to give an idea of what it will all look like in motion :
There will be turn-based RPG mechanics adapted to cycling. The team will battle against random elements and road events determined by topographical properties based on the player's travel choices. For example, the forest will prevent wind, while the mountains will increase the chances of ascents and descents. These elements will be encountered as some sort of enemies sending malus to the characters stats, and skills will be available to eliminate them or convert them into bonuses.
At each stage, between travel phases, visual-novel-style gameplay will be used to explore the towns and various locations in which the embodied cycling team stops. In addition to encounters with NPCS, dialogue trees will sometimes propose an area exploration system and generally will modify the statistics of roleplay elements according to decisions made, as can be done in Roadwarden or Disco Elysium.
We've also been working a lot on a sci-fi story set in a world finally decarbonized after a bitter struggle against a globalized thermo-fascist regime. A sort of “sweat-punk” utopia (like a variation on solar punk about Human-powered propulsion and energy, including lots of pneumatics and an obsession with bicycles) set after a dystopia inspired by our contemporary situation.
We've been working on this theme with references like Low-tech magazine and our reading of A Psalm for the Wild-Built in mind. We've also recently started reading specialized science fiction on feminism and cycling from Microcosm Publishing's “Bikes in space” catalog (thanks a lot Fisk for this discovery), which will surely inspire us for the rest of our narrative work.
We are excited about the next step. Adel is planning to reduce his professional time to do what he can on the project, keeping his fingers crossed that it will be a fun game. The idea is to make a demo, share things online while making it and see if there's a chance for some crowd based funding or why not find a publisher to finance the rest of the production (hoping we are not daydreaming).