The Making Of…
How a Formula 1 developer drove his “crappy car” simulator all the way to Steam success
How a Formula 1 developer drove his “crappy car” all the way to Steam success with Jalopy
Format PC, Xbox One
Developer Minskworks
Publisher Excalibur Games
Origin UK
Release 2018
Greg Pryjmachuk still remembers telling colleagues at Codemasters that he was leaving the company to make a road trip game. One where the protagonist wasn’t a person, but a ramshackle East German car driven to Turkey after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “One dickhead started laughing in my face at the concept,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well, I haven’t tried it yet. You don’t know if it’ll work or not.’”
Back then, Pryjmachuk worked as a designer on the Formula 1 games, an annualised series with a developmental lap time of just nine months. It left scant opportunity for innovation, but with Xbox 360 and PS4 looming, Pryjmachuk’s team were given a one-off extension to almost two years. As the F1 team dreamed up new features, they returned to the original series slogan, ‘Live The Life’. For Pryjmachuk, that meant adjusting the lens to bring the periphery of the race into focus. “I’m not a particularly competitive person,” he says. “I never really found the thrill in racing, winning or working your way up through the teams. I always used to love watching when a pit team would get a record for how quickly they changed the tyres on a car. The unsung heroes.”
As development wore on, it became clear that the only area in which Codemasters would manage to innovate was the graphics department. Yet the unrealised ideas stuck in Pryjmachuk’s head, and he set up an indie studio, Minskworks, to pursue them. “I started looking at moving the strategy of Formula 1, the pitting and the time management, into my own projects,” he says. “What if I took away all of what makes Formula 1 great, the high-performance race show, and just looked at a crappy car that you had to keep running?” The crappy car, Pryjmachuk decided, would be the Trabant – an East German model loaded with historical symbolism. “I’d had a long weekend break to Berlin,” he remembers. “It’s full of stories about how the Wall changed everyone’s life. You learn bits and pieces about it at school, but never the details of what happened after the war ended. And I’ve always loved two-stroke engines.”
In its initial conception, however, the project was no vehicle simulator, but an interactive narrative game. Named Hac – the Turkish spelling of Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca – it focused on the story of a worker returning to Istanbul after decades trapped on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. The worker wouldn’t be the player character, but their uncle, regaling them with stories from the Trabi’s cramped passenger seat. “That was more focused on the idea of a pilgrimage with religious tones,” Pryjmachuk says. “But I’m not a Muslim, so I felt like I was stealing the voice of somebody else.” The premise presented
“THAT’S A COMPLIMENT TO THE DESIGN. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT’S GOING ON UNDER THE HOOD”
mechanical problems too. Without voice acting, Pryjmachuk was reliant on speech bubbles, which triggered multiple choice answers, all while the player was steering the car. “It felt like trying to text while you were driving,” he says. “You just kept coming off the road and crashing.” As Pryjmachuk pared back the dialogue, just a few months from an early access release, he puzzled over what could replace it. And there was the Trabi, rumbling expectantly.
Today’s western cars are designed to put their owners at arm’s length, reducing them to operators rather than masters of their machinery. But the Trabant, first designed in the ’50s and scarcely modernised during the subsequent three decades of East Germany’s existence, was an amateur mechanic’s dream. Not only did the Trabi frequently break down, but it demanded owners reach into the mouth of the beast and fiddle with its innards to get it running again. Its oil was mixed by hand, and the 60-kilo engine block was light enough that a young, fit owner might lift it straight from the body, like a heart surgeon. Pryjmachuk saw that satisfaction awaited in that immediacy, and set about amplifying it through tactile sound design. “A lot of what I love about Minecraft is the noise of the items as they pop out,” he says. “I was trying to get that into Jalopy.”
Dubbed a ‘spark plug with a roof’, the car’s comparative simplicity lent it to modular game design. In Pryjmachuk’s new game, dubbed Jalopy, players could open the bonnet and identify faulty parts, pulling them from the vehicle to toss or sell them. And since the Trabi’s manufacturer enjoyed a state monopoly, replacement parts were never far away: either ordered in-game at local garages or salvaged from abandoned cars along the side of the road. “It used to really annoy me, but I’ve had to learn to take it as a compliment when people say it’s a simple game,” Pryjmachuk says. “Because that’s a compliment to the design. Nobody knows what’s going on under the hood.”
Pryjmachuk’s vehicle simulation background had worked its way to the centre of his new game – and once Jalopy launched on Steam in early access, he found an audience which embraced and encouraged that new focus. “They were really passionate and really helpful,” he remembers. “And I wanted to work for those people, rather than an audience that didn’t really exist.” Pryjmachuk enjoyed his new sounding board, thriving on the feedback and resistance that came with an existing community. “There can be an arrogance to your work, if you’ve spent too long on it alone,” he says. “You automatically think it’s got more worth than it has. The biggest complaint with Jalopy was that it came out too soon, but because it’s just me, and now Ruta [Melinaviciute, artist], we don’t have a greater context for things. We need to get it out early to guide where we’re going with it.” Initially, all players asked for was more cars. Pryjmachuk struggled to explain to those weaned on maximalist sims like Forza and Gran Turismo that Jalopy’s depth would instead come from knowing a single vehicle intimately. But within a few weeks, ‘cheerleader fans’ emerged in the forums, and they helped to shape the conversation into something productive. “I’m terrible at selling my games,” Pryjmachuk says.
“But people seem to see something in them, and then they’ll join the discussion.”
During development, Pryjmachuk stayed with his dad, and worked out of a chest of drawers. “I took the drawers out of it,” he says. “It’s probably the most comfy desk I’ve ever had. I told my dad, ‘I can’t see how I’m ever going to finish [the game]’. He’s quite laid-back and chilled out, and said, ‘Son, how do you eat an elephant? You take one bite at a time.’” This time-tested dad adage – or dadage, if you’ll forgive the neologism – was complemented by newer tools for self-discipline. “I used an app called Toggl, and when you press start, it starts counting the day down. If I went to the toilet or had lunch, I’d put it on pause. It’s like having a middle manager behind your shoulder: you’re always working, because that clock’s always running.”
It was a routine that sustained Pryjmachuk through to release. But simultaneously, Steam’s review system was pushing him into overwork. While he’d been grateful for the mechanic-sharpening blade of player feedback, it had proved double-edged. Some players loudly expressed their dissatisfaction if a suggested feature wasn’t added, and regularly accused him of abandoning the game. “You’re so at the mercy of it,” Pryjmachuk says. “Making games on Steam is like the developer and the player have both got a loaded gun pointed at each other. The problem is, you don’t know when you’ve had enough – and by the time you realise, it’s too late, you’ve burned out. After the final release date, I was just in bed for three days. I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t do anything.”
During early access, Pryjmachuk had pulled the uncle from the passenger seat, focusing instead on the car simulation features players demanded. But by the final release, the uncle had returned, providing much-needed context and closure to Jalopy’s road trip through Eastern Europe. “I want my games to be more than just simulators,” Pryjmachuk says. “I also want to make a living. But from my point of view, I think there’s a responsibility there. If I’m going to appropriate the setting and the timeline of a place where I don’t live and never grew up in, I think I’ve got to give it its due.” Uncle Lütfi rarely spoke other than to comment on your surroundings, or to tell you to pay at the front desk of another drab motel. But every time he put his head down to sleep, his briefcase would spring comically open at his side, revealing papers and letters that, over time, told the story of a family wrenched apart by the division of Germany. “The uncle is a character who holds in his emotions,” Pryjmachuk says. “That’s like the men in my family, they never show their true emotions. I liked that idea: how would you figure out their secrets?”
The tale unfolded over a journey that, initially, Pryjmachuk had hoped to make more varied and repeatable. “There were supposed to be more than just petrol stations and scrap yards as stop-off points. It was going to be more Roguelike in structure, with some surprise locations that the uncle would comment on. But the countries took so long to make, the time for that ran out. They didn’t feel like they were needed.” The game that shipped benefitted from its focus on inbetween spaces; the rainy motorways, empty showrooms and roadside power plants accentuated Jalopy’s
ownership of the mundane, which helped it stand in powerful contrast to mainstream gaming’s Cold War stories. Since none of these places could be mistaken for home, they pushed you forward, from one temporary respite stop to the next.
Pryjmachuk, too, has pushed forward since Jalopy’s release. After launch, his publisher offered a year’s development time to make a sequel. But Pryjmachuk wasn’t keen on that plan. In true Jalopy fashion, he would have rather continued to drive and upgrade the old vehicle than swap it for a new one. “I’m a believer in getting a good core game and updating it,” he says. “There’s a new bunch of 16-year-olds that enters the market every year, and they’re gonna jump on as well. It’s easier to keep a good game running than it is to make a new one.” Besides, he worried that ending development on Jalopy too quickly would curdle community sentiment. “I don’t want to wake up in the morning and go through a bunch of emails that are just people pissed off,” he says.
In the end, it was Pryjmachuk’s relationship with the publisher that turned, and the two parted ways. Today, he no longer has access to Jalopy’s
code, and is focused on development of a similarly whimsical construction simulator, Landlord’s Super. A spiritual successor to Jalopy,
though, is already under consideration. “We’ve been talking about what we do after Landlord’s, and it’s looking like a Jalopy- type game,” Pryjmachuk says. “It’s not set in Europe in that timeline, and it’s not about driving your uncle around, but it has a deeply mechanical car. Two years ago, when I started working on Landlord’s,
I thought there would be a glut of Jalopy- type games coming out, and I would have lost my niche. But there’s so much you can do.”
The Trabant had no indicators, no fuel gauge, and no seatbelts in the back. In its day, its owners must have only seen what was missing. Yet in modern Berlin, tourists pay to stuff their legs into old Trabis, sit down on their ripped seats and inhale their fumes as they trundle slowly around the city. It’s the same journey Pryjmachuk has been on with Jalopy. “Back then all I could see was the faults, and just couldn’t imagine anyone ever enjoying it,” he says. “I look back on it more endearingly now.”