Gaming
Games
The story behind Dirt Bike Unchained’s epic feel
With 13 years of experience making games, Kuuasema have nailed it again with Dirt Bike Unchained. We go offroad to find out how it all came together.
After the success of previous pedal-cycling based Bike Unchained games, Helsinki-based developer Kuuasema were, in their own words, tasked with making a dirt bike racer that nails the feeling of being a “pro rider riding fast, doing epic jumps and cool tricks”. No mean feat, you might think, especially on smartphones, but this is a studio with 16 years of experience able to commit to making the brand-new Dirt Bike Unchained the best game it could possibly be.
We sat down with Pekka Tanskanen, CEO of Kuuasema, to find out just what goes into making a game like this, how things change from title to title, the kind of research that goes on behind the scenes and how you keep people coming back to a game time after time.
Despite being made by a relatively small team of around ten people, Dirt Bike Unchained is an ambitious game, and a natural follow-up with many of the team having worked on the previous title, Bike Unchained 2.
“The initial concept was to create a motocross game building on learnings from Bike 2 Unchained but with a more robust metagame providing players with more to do and more interesting goals to achieve,” explains Tanskanen.
Athletes shaping the way we play
Dirt Bike Unchained developers used Red Bull athletes to shape the game
© Red Bull
Involving Red Bull athletes was a key part of research that took place. Top riders like Dakar Rally regular Laia Sanz and current WESS champion Manuel Lettenbichler were asked for their input to help development. This helped the team immensely because, like all good mechanics, they wanted to get under the hood and improve the engine some more.
“We weren’t entirely happy with the bike upgrading mechanic and wanted to change that,” Tanskanen says. “We also wanted the focus to be more on cooperative team play and provide a wide and deeper meta game in general.”
Something that’s always important to a game played on mobile devices are intuitive, easy to understand controls, and Dirt Bike Unchained maintains that easy to play, difficult to master ethos. Time your taps, time your steering; this one-button play is something the team were keen to preserve.
“Dirt Bike Unchained is meant to be played whenever you feel like some excitement, and being able to play the game with one hand makes that possible”, says Tanskanen. “Actively pressing to accelerate and timing jumps and curves also gives you the rush of actively doing things and many points of success – or failure.”
Always something to come back to
How do you make sure people come back to your game over and over?
© Red Bull
There’s a lot of competition in the mobile space these days. The advent of Apple Arcade, for example, has brought triple-A visuals and production values to iPhones and iPads the world over. Dirt Bike Unchained is no different, offering visuals that blur the lines between console and mobile with gorgeous vistas and realistic looking bikes. There are over 20 bikes in the game to unlock, customise, and upgrade, as well as 24-player team co-op, so you’re never alone. Instead, you’re always grabbing rewards with fellow motorsports fans as you go from Dust Eater to proud owner of a Red Bull helmet just like Supercross champion Cooper Webb.
All of this adds up to a highly replayable game, which is something the team at Kuuasema are keen to stress is important. “In the future there will be various kinds of events and challenges to give the players a more varied experience,” Tanskanen hints. So there will be plenty of content to keep you coming back, enabling you to try and beat your times and improve all the time.
Hot laps, new bikes, new paint jobs
There’s plenty of content to come still in Dirt Bike Unchained
© Red Bull
“We also plan to expand the game with new tracks and eventually new bikes,” Tanskanen tells us. So there’s more than just challenges and times to beat, it seems. “Yeah, ideas such as trikes, quads and classic motocross bike trees have been presented, and equipping bikes and riders with new paint jobs, clothes and other accessories is also under development,” Tanskanen continues.
Like the very best dev-teams out there, Kuuasema aren’t walking away from Dirt Bike Unchained any time soon. Along with the regular updates and ways to keep people coming back, enjoying high-octane action whenever it takes their fancy, the team told us that fan feedback is important, too.
“We’re always on the lookout for whatever the players want, so please tell us what you want to see,” says Tanskanen. That sounds like a call to action, so get racing, get customising, and then be sure to let the team know what you’d like to see included. We’ll see you offroad.
Dirt Bike Unchained is available now on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
