ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY, GIVEAWAY, NEW GAME 🥳 🎊

The beginning

When I was 20, I had a college course called Object-Oriented Programming for which we had to make an application using C++. I made a small pseudo-3D game which I liked. I knew I wanted to make an Out Run -like game with Outrun aesthetics. So I started working on PalmRide with my friend COVALENT. After the summer of 2020, most of the mechanics of the game were already in place.

The art was 100% done by myself. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great either. A guy saw one of my reddit posts where I would showcase the game, and he offered to redesign the car of the player. I accepted his proposal, and I let him redesign that car. The result was astonishing. I was so impressed that I proposed him to redraw all the assets of the game. At that time, only the city (Shinjitsu) game map was done, so he redrew those assets. When he was done with that, we released the demo of the game which received quite some positive feedback among the people who played it. The guy I'm talking about is Renegade_John.

Until that point, the development of the game was not fast, but at least it was slow and steady. In March of 2021, the development would almost stop for various reasons. I was not only overwhelmed by the college assignments I had to do, but I was also depressed about some personal troubles. At that time, we were in the middle of the pandemic. Not leaving the house for a year had a very negative impact on me, and accentuated my depression. I was almost miserable. Working on PalmRide was the last thing I was thinking about. COVALENT couldn't work on the game much either. College kept him busy too. Not only that, but he was fighting with his own personal troubles too. Regarding Renegade_John, he just got a job at a game studio as an artist, so he had less time to work on PalmRide. Not only that, but he didn't feel that confident working on a game with pixel art graphics, as that was not really his art style.

The game had to be released, so I pushed myself hard to finish the game in June 2021, as I had successfully passed all my exams. I talked to Renegade_John and he agreed that he would create the remaining assets for the game in the following weeks, and so he did. After that, only me and COVALENT were left to finish the game. I was still depressed at that time, so initially I didn't code that much. I pushed hard during August and September, right before the launch. Luckily, the depression started going away before launching the game (as a side note: I recommend the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F for situations like these. Reading philosophy books also helps combat depression, but better off consult a specialist).

One week before launching the game, and the game was missing only one important piece. That piece was the song for the beach (Ocean Drive) game map. COVALENT started working on it pretty much when we started development, but he couldn't get it to sound right no matter how hard he tried. He was now rushed to finish it so we could ship the game. What ended up happening was that he completely threw away the existing song he was working on, and started a brand