No Brakes io - Interview with Totebo on Edamame Reviews

Who has fallen in love with at least one (.io) game in their lifetime? If you are one of the many millions who ~~waste~~, we mean “enjoy” their lives playing (.io) games, today we’ve got an interview with the very people who ~~ruin~~, make your life better! 😜

If you haven’t already fallen victim to a (.io) game you can check out our review of No Brakes.io here.

Before we start we’d like to thank the Totebo Team for participating in our interview and for answering all of our geeky questions! Thanks guys!

…and without further ado, our interview begins…

Ok first up, why did you decide to make No Brakes io?

The inspiration for this game was a 1978 arcade game called Sprint. In Sprint you use a real steering wheel to control an ever-accelerating race car around a track.

Here is a video of Sprint in action:

I wanted to bring this mechanic to mobile in a more casual way. This led to me making No Brakes, which was released in 2014 and became an unsuspected smash hit.

The original idea was to make No Brakes multiplayer, but multiplayer is HARD. I had released three more games before I sat down and focused on making a new version of No Brakes, which turned into No Brakes io.

We love the cute and very customisable characters! Could you tell us a little about what went into creating them?

One of the features missing from the original No Brakes was customization. When I had the first prototype of No Brakes io ready, I made it a focus to be able to customize EVERYTHING. I wanted the player to feel like they could build their own ride and show it off in races. Is it a car? A boat? A motorcycle? It’s up to the player to decide.

No Brakes io is different from other racing games that tend to be very serious and “real”. I wanted to make something fun, something new that broke the rules a bit. I wanted the start line to be a crazy collection of shapes, sizes, colors, and smiles.

What advice would you give a new player trying No Brakes io for the first time?

Don’t worry if you crash! It can be difficult to finish a race, but if you don’t, it doesn’t really matter. Just have fun, crash into people, see how far you can get. I built the game to be fun, not punishing.

(Edamame) So that is what makes the game so addictive! 😆

Ok, now for some geeky questions. What programming language and or software did you use when making No Brakes io?

I used Gideros. Gideros is a 2D game SDK using Lua as a programming language. It’s free, open source and amazingly easy to get going with. Since I do both the code and art I also used Photoshop and Sketch 3 (mac) for the graphics.

What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing No Brakes io?

There are many challenges that come with it simply being a multiplayer game. I made more than ten prototypes before I settled on how the game works now. The first prototype I tried was the original No Brakes, and anyone can join and leave at any time, a bit like Agario. This didn’t work at all. I didn’t have collisions then, and other players became just random vehicles that might as well have been bots. I realized that for multiplayer to work, the focus has to be on player interaction. As soon as I made the game into a race, where players can bounce into each other and scramble to the finish line, it was instantly fun. So I went down that route, adding a turbo boost, missiles, and bombs to make things more interesting.

Another challenge was to make things actually work; there is a lot of data to be sent between players, so this needs a lot of thought. Luckily I have a genius friend who built an amazing multiplayer system called Liten. It means “small” in Swedish, and that was the whole idea behind it; how can you send a lot of data as simply as possible. What we ended up with is a scalable and efficient system that works well for any type of multiplayer game. So watch this space!

I can go on and on about the challenges in making this game, so I’ll just do one more. Testing. In a single player game, you can test most things yourself. But how do you test seven players in a multiplayer game yourself? It’s not easy. This is when friends and family come in. It’s amazing how many things you learn as soon as you have someone else playing that game. I also used a great QA company called Proper QA to do the final tests.

Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?

I have no idea! I suppose much of it comes from games I’ve played and loved. In my games, I try to find what the core thing that makes something fun is, and then strip away the rest. If a game gets your heart rate up, that’s usually a really good sign.

A few words to No Brakes io fans on Edamame Reviews.

I’m going to update the game constantly. The next things to go in – apart from bug fixes – are more shapes and faces. I may add another track too if there are enough players to fill it. It’s important to play real people (even though there are bots if needed) because the real fun is to try to find that race line that lets you overtake real players.