Hairy Heart Games

Description

Yucatan is a fast-paced, neo-mexican, space-punk driving experience. It's a 3D arcade racing game, with exploration, puzzles, and massive explosions. You unlock abilities and use them to access new areas and new tracks. There's a cast of fun characters, and an epic story based on Mayan folklore. But most of all it has amazing handling, exceptional drifting, some serious jumps, and you can drive upside down.

History

The idea for Yucatan came in a vision, one dark night in 2012. Hairy Heart founder and boss-man, Joe Bain, was tripping out, probably watching your favourtie anime or listening to that band you saw once at that festival. In the midst of a wild fever-dream, the main character, Charlie Skullface, appeared and recited a long game design document, including online multiplayer. As Joe furiously wrote down the long, complicated design document, a postman knocked on the door. The delivery of the rare issue #9 of the 2015 reboot of DC's Omega Men, interrupted the reverie, and the game design, fresh from the skull's lips [skulls don't have lips], was lost in the incoming breeze. Hence there will be no online multiplayer.

That's only partly true, the initial inspiration for the game came from the games I loved growing up, particularly Rollcage, Crazy Taxi, and Ridge Racer. I wanted to take the fun handling, and over-the-top themes and see where I could push them. Yucatan is the game I always dreamed of playing.

The Mexican influence came via an Irish pub in London, called "The Yucatan". I didn't know what a Yucatan was but the name drew me in, and before I knew it I was reading about Montezuma and Cortes, learning Spanish on duolinguo, and ordering books of Mayan folklore from Amazon. It may seem like an odd pairing but it made sense to me. The further I've gotten into it, the richer the seam of Mexican culture has become. Hopefully it makes sense to you too!

Team

Joe Bain is the founder of Hairy Heart and the programmer, designer, and general motivator on Yucatan. He lives in Glasgow and works as a freelance Unity programmer. He loves arcade racers from the 32-bit era.

Ethan Redd became involved in the project through twitter. He has been producing some outstanding, retro-core lowpoly games and art for years now. He's based in America and is a force of nature, the art side of things is down to him.

Dicky Moore, when he's not rocking out playing TV theme songs to rapturous audiences in Japan (that's actually true, he plays for Dream Themes), puts together awesome tire-squeal sound effects using only a kitchen bin and a roll of brown tape (that's probably not true, I haven't checked). He's based in Bristol, UK.

Victor Rosas is a Mexican sociolgist and videogame writer for the website LevelUp.com. He came on board as a consultant and writer for the project, overseeing the story, characters and dialogue, and making sure they have an authentic Mexican style. Victor is based in Mexico City.