over the hill: Creating a Co-Op Driving Adventure Game
Dune Casu, Founder and Creative Director, and Pietro De Grandi, Chief Operating Officer at Funselektor, spoke about over the hill, explaining some of the inspirations behind the game, as well as why they chose the road-trip genre and the multiplayer mode.
Introduction
Dune Casu: I'm Dune Casu, Founder and Creative Director at Funselektor, along with Pietro De Grandi, Chief Operating Officer at Funselektor. We are a combined team of 12-14 members, which includes a mix of full-time, part-time, and contractors based in Europe, except for me in Canada. over the hill is a co-development between Funselektor and Strelka Games. After graduating from technical school with a video game programming degree in 2014, I was unable to find a job, but I was in love with this drifting car game I'd been working on for my final practicum project at school.
After Kotaku covered a small public demo of that game, which I ended up calling "Absolute Drift", I pushed it onto Steam Greenlight, then founded Funselektor after it was greenlit. All of the commercial projects I've worked on have been under the Funselektor name and have driving vehicles as their main theme, including Absolute Drift (2015), art of rally (2020), and Golden Lap (2024). Strelka Games' most recent titles are Circle of Sumo (2020), Hell is Others (2022), and Golden Lap (2024), which was another co-development.
over the hill
Dune Casu: The vision is inspired by Funselektor’s previous games, where we enjoy mixing beautiful environments with engaging driving physics that require mastery. This time, with over the hill, we also added elements of exploration and multiplayer as well. I came up with the idea for it after playing many hours of the game Snowrunner, an off-road driving game where you have to navigate difficult terrain.
I enjoyed it but sometimes found it too challenging, so I figured there's space for a game that's a bit less difficult. Our previous game, art of rally, has a free-roam mode where you explore large maps with roads, so I had the confidence that adding an exploration element to a similar dynamic could work. In the team, we call it an "open-world off-road exploration" game.
The Story of the Game
Pietro De Grandi: The game has no conventional plot, but the world tells the story: fire-watch towers, abandoned logging gear, mining structures, cabins, ancient ruins, and oases scattered along your route hint at past human activity, but without exposition that gets in the way of just exploring the world. Rather than a scripted plot, the experience focuses on emergent storytelling that surfaces through your journey.
The core idea we've built the game around is to let people take these classic 1960s–1980s off-roaders on go-at-your-own-pace expeditions through interconnected wilderness biomes, which are inspired by real locations (Canada and Algeria at launch).
We think it's unique because it makes the game an almost anti-racing/driving game: no timers, no lap times, no leaderboards, and no need to rush. The challenge for players is just to reach a place at all, not how quickly they can do it. We want to let people pick their way, so they can explore their surroundings and get lost in nature.
In terms of who'll enjoy it, we think players who just enjoy driving over winning, fans of art of rally, but also people who enjoy games like Pacific Drive and SnowRunner but are also looking for a calmer, more accessible take on that type of gameplay. Overall, we want to give people a slower-paced adventure packed with discovery that they can share with friends.
I think the road-trip genre resonates with people as it taps into the "van life"/overlanding fantasy. It's that appeal of disconnecting, being out in nature, and the nostalgia for both intentionality and escaping a hyper-optimized world. There is something really special about wandering around and letting yourself get surprised again: by a landscape; a beautiful animal; a cozy morning rain; or a beautiful sunset across the desert, all while moving at your own pace and choosing your own path to your next destination.
Mechanics of the Game
Pietro De Grandi: The core loop of over the hill is: read the terrain, pick your line, manage your vehicle's limits to reach landmarks and Points of Interest; all while unlocking vehicles, upgrades, tools, and customizations along the way. Vehicles react to surface type and weather, so it's about the approach, not memorizing a course. Planning the right tools to bring with you to reach your destination is essential.
A few ideas we're especially proud of are the systems that make the world feel less static. Wildlife and photography give players reasons to slow down and pay attention to their surroundings. We also have multi-winch setups, so players can create little car trains or recover each other in more creative ways. On the multiplayer side, we wanted the game to feel seamless, with the same progression carrying between solo and co-op, so that players can explore at their own pace without feeling like they’re starting over.
Multiplayer Mode
Pietro De Grandi: Off-roading is inherently a convoy activity in real life: friends helping each other through obstacles and winching each other out. By adding multiplayer, you make the gear/recovery systems social, add camaraderie, and shared discovery without competition. It also boosts the emergent gameplay, creating a lot of unexpected situations to get into and memories to make with friends. We intentionally designed the multiplayer aspect to be flexible, though: solo trips for solitude/meditation, or group sessions for a few laughs. Neither is the wrong way to play.
Engine for the Project
Dune Casu: We chose Unity for the project as that's what our team knows best. My perspective is mostly on the creative side, and, as far as I know, we haven’t created many custom tools. Most of the work has been coordinating the third-party tools we use for major things which Unity doesn’t support out of the box, are lacking in quality, or are at risk of deprecation (lighting, level design, terrain tools, optimization, multiplayer), so a lot of our team’s time has been spent ensuring that the combination of tools work well in synchronicity across all of the platforms we support, and also for the custom needs we have.
Development Process
Dune Casu: We started with the goal of announcing the game in January 2025, so we focused on making it look good enough for trailers and marketing material. Because we are self-funded and self-published, we tend to plan for a short development timeline, keeping scope flexible and adapting it based on the players' reception at announcement. In this specific case, we decided to skip pre-production (which came to bite us a bit later on) and went all-in with the driving mechanics, visuals, and aesthetics for the announcement.
1-2 months after the announcement, we had our trailer accepted to feature in the Triple-I showcase, so we had to have a build ready for trailer capture and had to go full-on with visual improvements, all while keeping a sane development timeline to try to ship the game that year. Given how much players loved the concept right away, and the hype that was generated, we then decided to expand the scope with the goal of having a more complete game, resulting in pushing the release past our initial 2025 target and adding even more features for players like animal photography.
As more opportunities and deadlines have arisen during development, this pattern has continued, and it's been a bit chaotic, but the team has done a great job taking it all in stride.
Demo
Pietro De Grandi: The demo was received really well, with 81% positive reviews and so much love sent to us through the feedback form and from all of our communities. We knew there was a lot of excitement for the demo, but the reception and the success have definitely exceeded our expectations.
We are still analyzing the feedback we've had so far and adjusting our roadmap to include it, but it hasn't changed the goals we've set for the game. The plan is to keep working hard toward the releases on PC and consoles, and then to keep improving the game and updating it after launch with free updates and DLC.
Conclusion
Pietro De Grandi: The platform we use the most to communicate with our community is our Discord server, but people can also follow the game's development on Steam, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. over the hill is planned to release later this year on Steam, with versions for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 to arrive after.
