Game In Development: Switchcars

Switchcars is a game in which you run away from aliens across procedurally generated environments using vehicles that you run into along the way. You can have up to three vehicles at a time between which you can switch. The vehicles can run out of fuel, break down or you might crash making them unusable. There’s traffic in the game so you can get new ones. You have to be careful in choosing the vehicles because the environment is changing periodically, and different vehicles run on different environments. There are more than 1000 vehicles that you can encounter and more than 70 environments.

Different environments

Switchcars is also a game that I was really terrible at playing. A lot of the time I would have only one vehicle in my inventory which would run out of fuel very soon and I would have to walk because when that happens, there’s no other vehicle on the current screen. Even when I had all the vehicles I’d crash them (and watch them burn). And then when I’d get to the alien part he would, of course, kill me. Occasionally I would get my character smashed into a car. Apparently, I think that the Force is strong with me so I just stand before the car waiting for it to stop. However, anyone who’s ever played Nidhogg with me can tell you that, no matter how terrible I am at playing something, I will play it for hours if I’m having fun. Naturally, if you play something for hours you get better at it. The controls become intuitive, you pay more attention to the details and figure out the best way to fight the boss (or avoid it). The thing that keeps me going in Switchcars is discovering new vehicles and unlocking new environments. I can’t wait to get to the space environment, you can run into NASA’s Orion there!

Space environment

Slobodan Stević aka Altfuture got the idea for for Switchcars about six years ago. “It just started as a picture, as concept art. Since then, there was this big delay of two years where I couldn’t figure out how to make a good gameplay out of it.” But in a way, Switchcars has been a part of him his whole life, or at least elements of the game.

“Between the ages of 8 and 13, I used to draw pictures of different vehicles on slips of paper. I counted over 400 of them. Perhaps this is a true Switchcars predecessor, because the idea was all about this system. All of them had their specific manufacturer, their specific role in this kind of fictional universe. I’d draw a trolleybus with a big tank on its back, weird things like that. But the idea was basically to have all these different vehicles, the most notable ones. I guess I got the inspiration for that from bubble gum inserts. I used to collect those and then I got the idea I should make my own.”

Vehicles drawn on slips of paper

When he was a kid he used to visit his grandmother’s place which has a balcony and a great view of the highway a few hundred meters away. “This was really influential because this view of the highway is pretty much what you see in Switchcars. Although, of course, much closer.”  He made up a game that he and his cousin would play. They would draw columns on paper, each representing a different type of vehicle like car, truck, bus and they had a specific icon for every vehicle. One of them would look at the vehicles coming from the right of the highway and the other one from the left and they would draw down the icons of the vehicles they saw in the corresponding columns. After about 10 minutes of playing they would swap papers and count points. Different vehicles had different points. “It was my dream – and I had an icon for it – to see a tank or a locomotive going over that highway and that would be a million points, or a passenger airliner and, you know, something like that.“ He, obviously, never saw that on the highway but he made it possible in Switchcars. You can go from a car to a train to a boat and even jump on a horse.

Highway view

Another game that he made up when he was a kid involved toy cars. He and a friend of his had a lot of toy cars so they would mix them up. “The game was pretty funny. The carpet had some kind of a pattern that looked like a road so that was the city or something. And I would sit in the corner so the road would go around me and I would have the pile of cars behind me. So I was like the game master so I would pick two cars with my hands and then I’d drive them as traffic. When one would go over the edge I’d take the other. And my friend would be a guy walking around in the city. He’d be looking for a job, buying vehicles, food and then sometimes some asshole would bump his car and there were all these events. It was literally the game I later wanted to make, this Hot Drive I was making in Deluxe Paint. This was perhaps the first game design created from that idea with vehicles even though it was not a video game.”

Hot Drive title screen

The video game that influenced his idea for Switchcars the most was Super Crate Box. “It is a game from Vlambeer about a guy who jumps around switching weapons. You have to go around picking crates and you never know what you will find in them. It’s always a weapon, but you don’t know which one and it replaces the one you already had. And I was thinking of doing the same thing with vehicles. Originally the game was supposed to have crates, you were supposed to be alone in this universe, you would jump over dunes and go over lakes and you would stumble upon crates and pick up vehicles from them. But when I started working on the new Switchcars version, the current one, I started adding traffic into it. And then it sort of became normal that you could just come out of the vehicle and take someone else’s.”

You can watch the trailer below but have in mind that it is 6 months old. The game is still under development and hopefully this is the year it comes out. You can follow a detailed development log on tigsource or just updates on tumblr and twitter.

This is part one of my conversation with Slobodan Stević. Part two will be about how he started working on the game and what keeps him motivated to continue.

Images courtesy of Slobodan Stević.

Copy-edited by Ana Čomor