A video game released earlier this year allows users to ride a unicycle through Vancouver-inspired cityscapes and perform various tricks, all to a soundtrack of pumping punk rock music made entirely by local bands.
Street Uni X is primarily the work of one East Vancouver resident, themselves a unicyclist, who says their creation is a love letter to the underground punk communities of the city, and the push for self-expression they represent.
It was published through a Toronto-based co-operative that says it is reimagining how video games are produced to both platform underrepresented developers and counteract mass layoffs in the games industry.
Street Uni X features professional unicyclists doing tricks in, among other places, a skatepark set along SkyTrain tracks and Metro Vancouver’s mountains and shoreline.
It’s largely the brainchild of one person – Daffodil – who goes by a singular name and uses they/them pronouns. Unicycling is their primary mode of transportation.
“The game itself is influenced by skateboarding and snowboarding and BMX games of the past,” they said. “So, you know, unicycling in this way just fits into that scene.”
“People often treat unicycling like it’s a joke or like it’s a punchline or it’s only for clowns or whatever,” they added. “But you know, it’s cool, it’s fun, expressive.
“Underground punk scenes are immersed in the liberation of all people and that kind of means something to me, and I try to integrate that into my work.”
Street Uni X is a retro callback to extreme sports video games from 20 years ago. Vancouver developer Daffodil is calling it the world’s first authentic street unicycling video game — and it was published through a co-op trying to change how games are developed.
The developer said they skateboarded for a long time, having developed community connections in East Vancouver skateparks, before they got into street unicycling around 2018.
That year, they went to a professional unicycling convention called Unicon in South Korea.
“I met some riders there who I had seen online who were doing cool tricks and posting videos and really inspiring me.
“That just kind of fed into my obsession with making the game.”
The developer said they worked on the game in their spare time as they moved further into the hobby of unicycling, creating an “obsessive feedback loop” that culminated in them eventually developing the game full time around 2022.
STOKED to share the Official Trailer for STREET UNI X ! <a href=”https://t.co/pVZCFHze40″>pic.twitter.com/pVZCFHze40</a>
—@StreetUniX
As the project gained steam, they approached the unicyclists that inspired them to take up the hobby — as well as local punk rock acts that they saw live in Vancouver — so they could appear in the game.
“I want to know the musicians, I want to know the music, I want to celebrate people in my community,” Daffodil said. “Community is, like, critical for me.”
Daffodil’s game eventually came to fruition thanks to the help of friends who helped with 3D art — as well as funders.
Future of non-profit game development
Street Uni X was published by Gamma Space, a Toronto-based co-operative game collective, and funded by Weird Ghosts, a company that funds underrepresented creators.
Gamma Space says it wants to reimagine how games are developed given huge waves of layoffs over the past year at major video game studios, with an estimated 6,000 jobs lost in 2023 alone.
The same month that Street Uni X came out, the companies also oversaw the publishing of Psychroma — a psychological horror game set in a dystopian version of Toronto and developed by Rocket Adrift.
Sloane Smith and Lindsay Rollins, who are two of three developers on the team, said having money to focus on their work was especially important given the precarious nature of art funding in Canada.
“When you’re an indie developer and you need that support, you kind of have to be a little bit more, I guess, mercenary with your decisions about your art,” Smith said.
Henry Faber, who created the publishing program at Gamma Space, said his co-op aims to help developers make games more sustainably.
“I realized that we had to think of this differently. We had to not prepare ourselves to be fed to the machine,” he said.
Self-expression and unicycling
Rocket Adrift’s Rollins said that Psychroma derived a lot of value from its community, and was a deeply personal project focused on 2SLGBTQ+ themes.
“We wanted it to take place in Toronto to get across the theme of not having secure financial resources and, like, struggling to find a community,” she said.
Faber said the co-op model, which allows for pooled resources and contributions, would allow such personal projects to bloom even amid dire straits for many video game studios.
For Daffodil and their game about street unicycling, they say the value of self-expression and being earnest was paramount, and shone through in their work.
After they began their six-year-long journey of unicycling and making their game, they said they started to become recognized in the streets of Vancouver and brought smiles to their community’s faces — something they describe as a privilege.
“I want to live true to myself, even when the world says that that’s a problem, or even when people hassle me about it on the street,” they said.
“And I don’t know if it makes me feel any particular way other than this is the way that I need to be.”