Interview: FutureGrind is Uniracers Meets Trials

One of the SNES's cult classics was the Rare-developed Uniracers. Despite critical acclaim, the title never saw a sequel due to a lawsuit with Pixar. While definitely a unique game in its own right, upcoming PlayStation 4 and PC title FutureGrind is the closest unicycling enthusiasts will get to a Uniracers sequel.

To find out more about this gorgeous stunt-platformer, we reached out to Milkbag Games' Owen Goss, one of the studio's Co-Founders alongside Matt Rix.

VGChartz: How would you explain FutureGrind to those who've never played it?

Owen Goss: FutureGrind is a futuristic stunt-platformer that’s all about challenge, tricks, and skill. You control a futuristic vehicle, called a grinder, with two coloured wheels that can spin around. You ride the grinder through a track made of rails of different colours. You have to match the blue wheel to blue rails and the red wheel to red rails, all while doing tricks and building huge combo chains to maximize your score.

VGC: The small demo at E3 was very difficult. How do you balance the game making sure that players are being challenged, but also having fun?

OG: Yes, the game is challenging. That said, we’ve made a lot of design choices that make learning to play less frustrating. For example, when you crash your grinder, you can restart your run immediately. There’s no wait to reset and try again, so that makes failure less painful. We also keep the track designs short enough that even if you crash right near the end of a track, it doesn’t feel like you’ve just wasted a huge amount of time. There will be lots of balance work to do as we continue to build the game, but these are the kinds of things we’re thinking about.

VGC: The idea of FutureGrind has floated around Matt's head for a while now. How many different art styles has the game gone through?

OG: The original prototype for the game was in 2D, in a pretty clean, vector art style. Once we decided to move forward with development, my first concept art was for a 2D, pixel-art game. However, at some point we started wondering what the game would look like in 3D. I did some early mockups and when we showed them to some of our friends everyone said, “yes! You have to make this in 3D, that looks amazing!” So at that point the game became a 3D game.

Some of the original concept art I did for the game set the game in a post-apocalyptic world. But we pretty quickly decided that we weren’t interested in making a really dark game. So we’ve decided to set the game in more of a post-post-apocalyptic world, where we’ve gone through some bad times, but we’ve rebuilt, and now we have the sport of FutureGrind.

To read the full interview check out the link below...