Developing a retro parkour game

Freestyler is a fast-paced retro parkour game, where you roam around the rooftops of the city, performing tricks.

The goal of Freestyler is to build up momentum and skate through the city on your Heelys - remember those? To build up momentum, you have to land at the right angle or use a boost. Higher momentum means bigger jumps. While you're in the air, you can perform tricks which earn you points. The higher your momentum, the higher the multiplier for your score.

And that's the whole concept of Freestyler. Everything else: the user interface, the music, the street fighter-esque narration, is there to make this simple gameplay feel as satisfying as possible.

We developed the game during a 36-hour game jam. There we noticed something interesting: While testing out small features or tweaks we made, we would find ourselves just running around the level chaining backflips together, forgetting what we were actually trying to do.

And that's quite a good thing, because it means we succeeded, the game is just really fun to play.  And so we decided to make Freestyler into a fully fledged game.

So follow along, updates coming soon!