Some good news and a roadmap
Last summer we (Adel and Vincent) applied for a grant from the CNC (The French National Centre for Cinema and Moving Images) to finance the game design conception and writing of The Wind Through the Wheels, and it was accepted!
We received this news in December 2023, signed the contract in February and received 75% of the money last month.
It's €10,000, which we split 50/50. It won't be enough to finish the game, but it will allow us to work on it part-time until 2025. It's a great start for the game!
I (Adel) feel very fortunate to be able to work on a game with a friend, and I'm convinced that all the support I've received since I started sharing my work has contributed greatly to this situation. I'm very grateful to everyone who follows my work and encourages me with their compliments, comments, messages and questions. It has really changed the way I work and made me feel legitimate in what I do. Two years ago, I would never have dared to ask an institution for funding.
The CNC gave us a summary of their deliberations. They felt that our project stood out for its originality and the quality of its visual direction. They were interested in the fact that the initial narrative and ASCII display raised environmental concerns. They also expressed some concerns about the effectiveness of the gameplay, the feasibility of an ASCII display and the need for more in-depth narrative work.
We now have one year to work on defining the game and turning it into a game design document. This needs to be a 40-50 page document describing the narrative, game mechanics and art direction in as much detail as possible. We also need to keep track of the chronology of our work and specify our spending on the project.
To give you an idea of what we sent to the CNC, here's the PDF we submitted [link]
Our roadmap
As well as writing the game, we want to produce a demo that can be used as the basis for a crowdfunding campaign so that we can continue to work on the game. We hope to achieve this before 2025, although we still have a lot of work to do before we get there.
Beyond these goals, we want to continue to work on things in a free and experimental way. This applies to the narrative, the gameplay and the visual direction. What will not change is the text mode rendering of the game's graphics, the cycling theme, and a gameplay that is mainly based on exploring and training in side view.
For example, we will soon be trying to render game visuals in a coloured raster style, and on the writing side we are working on a sci-fi theme where humanity has abandoned fuel-based technologies for human motricity and penumatic-based tools. A kind of Solarpunk derivative, something like Rollerpunk, Airpunk or maybe Sweatpunk?
A devlog
Today we launched our devlog https://the-wind-through-the-wheels.com/ where we will publish our progress. This site is available in French and English. We have already published two posts which are the two threads about the game we published previously on social media. To easily follow our news, we have set up an RSS feed https://the-wind-through-the-wheels.com/rss/
An article on the mathematics of cycling we are using for the gameplay will be published soon.
We have also re-posted the May 2023 article on Velvetyne about the Jgs Font, the font used for the game's rendering, this article also talks more broadly about ASCII art, some of its artists and history.
The design of this blog is probably temporary, very Web 1.0, it aims to recall the mood of the oldschool web and operating systems of the 90s, the period when the ASCII art scene emerged on Usenet. Still, this style might be a bit harsh for a game promotion.
February-March progress
We haven't shared any news from the project on social media since February, but there has been progress on several aspects of the game.
A first stage in the making
We started a first stage of the A first stage in the makinggame. This involved integrating the 3D landscapes generated from the topographical data we had, integrating a physics engine that translates the player's state into speed, power and distance, and creating a minimal physiological system to simulate the cyclist's endurance. This physiological system could lead us to a survival/simulation style of gameplay, perhaps requiring precise management of nutrition, hydration, rest, bike maintenance, etc. This type of gameplay seems appropriate for the contemplative aspect we want to focus on. In the same spirit, we think of games like Oregon Trail or Caribbean Sail for their mechanics of waiting, travelling and survival. We are also thinking of Lone Sails and how the scrolling of the landscape is at the heart of the gameplay. In a more RPG style, we are really into the writing of Roadwarden.
Progress on the game engine
While working on this first stage, we continue to work on the game engine. It's like a project within a project, we'd like to end up releasing it under a free licence and with enough documentation to ensure that it can be used by other people for other projects.
The short demo "A Very Bold Character" released by Adel last month (link) was a pretext for more extensive experimentation with the engine's capabilities.
This engine is called Textor and, apart from its use in The Wind Through the Wheels, it is used as the basis for a text-mode image editor that Adel uses for his latest artworks, experimenting with a bitmap rendering with colours as an alternative to the game's current black-and-white ASCII art.
In its latest version, Textor allows the same interactive features for both pure text and bitmap rendering.
At some point there will be a more specific article on the development of Textor.
What else we're working on
We also started researching graphics, atmosphere and colours. The challenge is finding a visual style that extends or matches the ASCII artwork.
Another big work in progress is the writing of the game's story. We started by writing short novels.
Some characters, places and events begin to emerge. We must give them characteristics, speech, geographical locations, specific environments. As stated above, the main theme is that humanity has chosen to move away from fossil fuels. We are exploring this in our novels. We have started three of them: one in which the main character encounters a farming community that uses only human motor power for work, another about people who are building their lives around a water source found in an abandoned oil field, and one in which the protagonist discovers a kind of mental superpower that allows him to create a kind of projection in different environments.
To write all this, we are documenting alternative energy sources, ways of travelling, pre-industrial ways of farming, alternative ways of living with animals, how to decontaminate industrial waste. We also read some science fiction. For example, we've read Becky Chamber's A Psalm for the Wild-Built, 2021, and R. F. Kuang's Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, 2022. We also read older books such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 1888, or William Morris's News from Nowhere, 1890.
Finally, with the aim of creating urban landscapes, we have been working on an ASCII art facade generator. This still needs some work, but we hope to release it as an independent tool under a free licence at some point.
