The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize independent game developers advancing the medium. This year, Game Developer sat down with the finalists for the IGFs Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees ahead of GDC to explore the themes, design decisions, and tools behind each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa.despelote lets you explore the streets of Quito, Ecuador as an eight year old child caught up in soccer fever, kicking your ball all over town and using it to interact with the places and people you meet.Game Developer sat down with Julin Cordero, lead developer of the multi-IGF Award nominated title, to talk about creating a game that focuses on things that happen around a sport as opposed to focusing on just the sport, the intriguing ways they captured the feel of Ecuador in 2001 when they were nearing qualification for the World Cup, and the thoughts that went into how the soccer ball would operate as players experience the world through kicking it all over town.Who are you, and what was your role in developing despelote?I am Julin Cordero, lead developer and designer of despelote. The rest of the team is Sebastin Valbuena who does the art and music, Gabe Cuzzillo who helps with production, and Ian Berman who does the sound design.Related:What's your background in making games?I studied game design at the NYU Gamecenter, made a bunch of games back as a student, and despelote was actually my capstone project 6 years ago. Weve been lucky enough to have received support from various sources to develop it all these years.How did you come up with the concept for despelote?The soccer culture in Ecuador is huge and I used to play so much of it growing up, but when I moved to NYC I stopped playing and engaging with it as much. When I realized this, I started to think about the role soccer had played in my life and I decided to make a game to explore this idea. I had always played big triple A sports games like FIFA, but the soccer you play there didn't represent the kind of soccer I actually grew up playing which took place in neighborhoods and parksnot in big stadiums in front of millions of people. I found that everything that happens around the sport is just as interesting as the sport itself, so we set out to make a game that focused on that.What development tools were used to build your game?Unity, Fmod, Scaniverse and Polycam for 3D scanning, Blender, Ableton, and Photoshop.Related:What thoughts went into creating a world that would offer so much fun, secret stories, and mischief for an eight-year-old to get into?The game is set at a very particular time in the recent history of Ecuador. In 2001, the country had just gone through a big economic crisis and it was very easy for everyone to latch on to the national soccer team for hope since they were on the brink of qualifying to the world cup for the first time ever. This is one of my earliest memories, but it is very hazy and a lot of it is reconstructed from stories I've heard. So when designing the world, we decided to integrate many perspectives into this depiction by having friends and family improvise all the dialogue in the game. We came up with some basic scenarios and told people to pretend like they are 2001 so that they could bring whatever memories they had about it into the recording sessions. The results were always surprising and integrating them into the game became an interesting design challenge.Not writing any of the dialogue allowed me to be a spectator of these moments, so it was very fun to pretend to be eight years old and come up with ways of being mischievous around them. For example, a couple having an anniversary picnic in the park was a lovely conversation from a real-life couple who brought stuff in from their actual relationship into the recording. Wouldn't it be great to be eight years old and use their orange juice as target practice? Maybe the fight that ensues after it splashes has a hint of their real relationship too.Related:Kicking the soccer ball is pretty satisfying (and not just because you've booted it at someone). What thoughts went into making the soccer ball kicking/dribbling mechanics fun and appealing on their own? Into making them fun in a first-person perspective?I remember some of the balls I played with as a kid and how deeply I got to know them. A beaten-up soccer ball has so many stories to tell; it is such a simple object, but it is so versatile. When thinking about how to depict this, our instinct was to try to make it feel very physical. We tried to avoid using magic forces to keep the ball in front of you and instead embrace the unexpected nature of it. The ball bounces around your feet; you never have full control of it, but you can sort of guide it to where you want. The first-person perspective allows the player to have a direct connection and ensure that the ball is always in the foreground. And when the ball is in the foreground, the background conversations and ambiences can slowly seep in.despelote uses a striking mixture of stylized realistic visuals (drawn from photographs) and animated characters. What appealed to you about this visual mixture? How do these visuals work with your vision for this exploration of Ecuador in 2001?Sebastin had been playing with this kind of aesthetic for a few years before I approached him to be part of the game. I was very inspired by some of his 2D animations, but he had never worked in 3D, so it was a challenge to bring his style into a first-person exploration game. However, when we started experimenting with the art, we quickly realized that the mix of black and white hand-drawn elements with a noisy background established a clear visual language that was intuitive for the player. We committed to this contrast and it gave us much liberty to play around with each style.What drew you to work with photographs while creating the world? What effect did you feel this had on the game and how the player will experience its vision of Ecuador in this time period?Similarly to how we wanted to "source" the dialogue from the real world by having friends and family improvise, we wanted to "source" the environment from the real world. The design of the map is not exactly an actual place in Quito, but we bring in assets from the real world to try to ground the game in a specific setting. It made a lot of sense to use photographs and 3D scans because the textures have so much personality built into them already, which gives the environment a very raw feeling.Games have a tendency of trying to avoid depicting the real world, probably because it is technically just as difficult to create a fantasy world as it is a real-life city block. But we have so many ways of capturing the world nowadays, and I think games are the perfect vessel to combine them together.You also work with audio to give the player a real sense of place while exploring despelote. Why was it important to capture the sounds of the world alongside the photographic visuals?I think that the more specific a depiction of a place is, the more relatable it can be even for people who have never been to that place. This is especially true for audio, because certain sounds can trigger nostalgic feelings without us fully understanding it. I live in NYC now, but hearing specific birds chirping that Ian recorded brings me back to being a kid in Quito. This is why we really wanted the game to sound like Quito, and Ian did an incredible job recording and mixing it all together.