The self-taught game developer Raul Diaz made his love of 1990s point-and-click adventures, cyberpunk, and Mad Max into a game. The game studio he initially built just for fun was turned into a real company with the first full-sized game project titled Scrap Riders. The game delivers something intimately familiar to those that have experienced classic adventure games from the likes of LucasArts and Sierra, but Diaz gave it his own spin.
From the beginning, Scrap Riders was meant to be a point-and-click adventure, and that made it an easy choice to follow in the footsteps of the aforementioned giants. The animation style, however, took more than just copying a known pattern, and that would halt the progress in the middle of the game's development. Bringing the development team's dreams to life wasn't simple, but they would eventually come together in a package that was both funny in a familiar way and yet oddly different from any of its progenitors, with Diaz recently speaking with Game ZXC regarding all of this.
LucasArts-Style Design Wasn't Easy for Scrap Riders
While the core gameplay mechanics in terms of LucasArts-style point-and-click were initially settled, finding a way to make the pixel animations expressive and complex was a struggle. Mid-development, the graphical artist had decided that the original art style wouldn't fit and had to start from scratch. It was extremely important to get the visual look and feel just right, and the initial go at it just wasn't what the artist had in mind.
After scrapping the earlier work, the team started working towards an updated style, which would focus on the expression on the characters' faces and movement animations. Creating pixel art characters is hard enough, but giving them expressions, both facial and otherwise, is a challenge on a different scale. This second take at creating the character style was inspired by how LucasArts and others would manage to deliver unique characters in games like Monkey Island and Full Throttle.
"LucasArts did a great job in Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion . And not only LucasArts but also Sierra and other 90s adventure games. So we wanted to create that feeling."
This was made even harder by the fact that Scrap Riders was not only a point-and-click adventure but one with a classic beat 'em up-style combat system and few added enhancements. It would have to fit in with the theme and not break the illusion. To make the transition more fluid, and incidentally funnier, alongside creating narration, the team made the decision to have short cutscenes between the fights and adventure sections.
Scrap Riders is Everything the Developer Loves
Perhaps the success comes from a wealth of strong influences across various media. Diaz was not only a die-hard fan of point-and-click adventures but was also enamored with a few other franchises from an early age. Mad Max movies had Diaz always wondering about the possibilities of the universe in a game of his own. The dog-eat-dog world with renegade gangs was a tempting prospect, but it also brought along challenges.
Diaz wanted to create an appealing visual representation for Scrap Riders and a post-apocalyptic wasteland would be anything but exciting audio-visually. Most of the colors of the rainbow would not fit into the barren wilderness of the endless desert. As a countering force to the grueling post-apocalyptic world, Diaz introduced another love of his. A cyberpunk aesthetic was added to the formula to allow the creation of more vibrant environments, with a range of colors now possible thanks to neon signs, colorful clothing, and high-tech gadgetry.
"You can play a lot with lights, and in the game, we've created very different environments for each district in the city. So we wanted to make the player feel the real difference between each place."
Bringing influences from Blade Runner and Neuromancer was, however, not only a visual choice. The story would tie in with the energy-creating devices and the transition between the wastelands and the city, as well. This would mean that the game would balance not only between changes in gameplay - switching from LucasArts to Streets of Rage, and back - but changes in scenery, too.
Scrap Riders was released for PC on January 9, 2023.