Keep Driving is not your typical RPG. Developed by YCJY, this game has taken the concept of role-playing games and applied it to a road trip. Based on such an original idea, it’s difficult to explain just how well they’ve managed to convey these concepts and how satisfying the result is. Thanks to our friend JMagna, who is also working on the translation of the game that will be released this week in an update, we were able to talk to its creators. Sit back, put on some good music, and enjoy the ride.
RPG Spain: Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves so that our readers can get to know you better?
Josef: We’re YCJY, a two person studio consisting of Christopher (programmer) and Josef (art), we met in college where we played in a band together and after college, living as roommates, we decided it would be fun to make games.
JMagna: Since you are a team of two, I’d like to ask: how do you find the motivation to keep making games? You have to overcome the mental barrier of thinking, “Okay, this will take years, but we want to make it happen.” I imagine money is an important factor, but your games are so unique that I don’t think it’s the main one.
Josef: It’s fun making games and there is still so much to be explored. I think we both have a strong sense of self expression and a desire to entertain. Money is important in planing but we’ve never, and probably wont ever, make a decision purely on what we think will sell the most.
Christopher: Yeah it’s definitely been harder to stay focused on Keep Driving as it’s been such a long project. Next game project will be much shorter.
RPG Spain: The idea behind Keep Driving is very original, and although the game is completely different, being on the road and enjoying it reminded us a little of Final Fantasy XV. Did this game serve as inspiration? If not, did you use any other RPGs as inspiration?
Josef: That’s funny, we actually said it’s like final fantasy when we started adding in the turn based fight system to some early testers, but nobody really understood and just ended up getting confused. So we stopped saying that. But, yeah, it wasn’t really an inspiration when coming up with the mechanics anyway.
Christopher: Also, it was hard to get an early prototype, as we needed so many systems in order to test it properly. With other games, we’ve usually had something playable very early.
RPG Spain: How was the experience of developing an RPG? We think that it involves much more work than other genres. Is that correct? Will you continue with this genre in the future?
Josef: Yeah it was really difficult to incorporate story within a systems based RPG. We also found it difficult to come up with gear, or upgrades, for the car that made sense. Not to mention balancing the costs of things and the availability of both upgrades and skills but also items and money. I think we would make another RPG but not a car one, and not one that’s as locked into a realistic setting as this one.
Christopher: Yeah and it’s pulled much inspiration from board games as well.
RPG Spain: For those who haven’t played it and don’t understand how a driving RPG can exist, what RPG concepts can we find in Keep Driving?
Josef: So think Diablo but with real time strategy… and in a car. The type of car is like your class, the upgrades are like gear; there are skill trees and characters to join your party with their own skills and passives. Then you also got inventory management and resource. Money, health (car HP and energy), and the constantly ticking gas. The most unusual part is how it’s in a lot of ways a side scrolling open world RPG
JMagna: I’ve noticed that the quality of EU developed games has been rising lately. We have titles like Split Fiction, Ninja Gaiden Ragebound, Baldur’s Gate III, Cyberpunk 2077, and Expedition 33. Since you are from Sweden, could you talk a bit about what it’s like to be a game developer in your country? When we boot up the game, we can even see the message “Supported by Creative Media Europe.” I’ve also noticed something similar with Altered Alma (Black Pic). Can EU games actually receive financial support from the EU?
Josef: They can! But it’s quite a convoluted process. We got support 40,000 Euros from Creative Media Fund the first time we tried making the game back in 2016. So as you can imagine the money ran out very quickly. Being a game developer in Sweden is quite nice because it’s cold and dark most of the year so there’s a lot of reasons to stay indoors.
RPG Spain: Music is always important in any RPG game, and in your case it takes even greater importance, how have you approached this section?
Josef: We had a long list of bands that we felt fit the vibe of the game and then we got a friend of ours to contact a few of them until we realized we needed bands that owned their own labels or didn’t have one. We also decided at one point to try to keep all the bands local. Only bands from Gothenburg Sweden.
JMagna: Since music is an important part of Keep Driving. I discovered a lot of great songs while playing the game thanks to all of the amazing tracks that we can listen while we keep driving across many locations. That made me wonder…, how did you come up with this selection of tracks?
Josef: Kind of knew most of the bands because we’d listened to them a lot before or it was friends’ bands. But ye we thought a lot about the vibe: most of them had to feel nostalgic in some way.
JMagna: Across our journey, we speak with many different side characters and we experience a lot of incredible (and crazy) stories. Some stories are something that many of us could have experienced while we were young. Were you reflecting on your teen years while writing the script?
Josef: Oh yeah for sure. Characters and stories were created through a weave of real experiences and books and films. We wanted everything in the game to be something people can imagine really happening. So reflecting on memories was really important.
JMagna: Besides having many different mechanics, the combat system really stands out. How did you come up with it? I really enjoyed the “Dungeon Crawler” sections too. Are you also fans of the genre?
Josef: We prototyped it by making a physical board game first. Inspired by board games like Gloomhaven and The 7th Continent.
Christopher: With the combat we wanted to have something like traditional turn-based combat where many of the game’s systems would «meet» and interact with each other (Resources, car upgrades, skills, items etc), but we wanted to capture the feeling of «solving a problem» rather than «defeating an enemy» whenever you beat an event, hence the puzzly nature of them.
JMagna: What can players expect to discover in future content for Keep Driving?
Josef: Haha, after this localization update, very little. Sorry! We are looking into making it more moddable though.
Christopher: Yes, after this patch (which does feature new content along with the new languages) we’ll focus on porting the game to consoles.
JMagna: Keep Driving will receive a new patch soon. As your Spanish translator, I would like to know which is the most challenging obstacle during the localization process.
Josef: I would assume its different for me and Christopher but just organizing everything and everyone. but ye otherwise FONTS. I feel like it’s always fucking FONTS!
Christopher: Yeah fonts are always a pain. Keep Driving is also our most text-heavy game by far. The way the text is integrated in all the different menus makes the localization-process much harder as well. Thankfully we’ve got help from gamemaker-guru Juju Adams who helped us build a flexible system for localization.
RPG Spain: Now that the game will be available in our language, what would you say to the Spanish public to encourage them to play your game?
Josef: It’d be really fun to hear about more Spanish road trip experiences from players that connected with the game and want to share their stories.
RPG Spain; Do you have a final message that you would like to share with our readers?
Josef: Keep exploring the world, keep trusting people, keep going even if it feels like you’re going upstream, keep driving on!
RPG Spain 