Ondřej Švadlena’s open-world driving game doesn’t look like any other. The cars are old and beat up, there are no timers or cheering crowds, and the California sun is nowhere to be seen. Instead, a brown murkiness hangs over the entire world, lending it an eerie and oppressive quality. This is a driving game inspired, not by long pleasure drives along some Pacific highway, but by a childhood spent living in and eventually fleeing the Soviet bloc.

In 1984, at the age of six, Švadlena almost snitched on his own parents to the secret police. He had come home from kindergarten and asked his mother if she would hang out the Soviet flag for Labour Day – a “tradition” enforced by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. “When she told me she would not, I told her I would have to report that to my kindergarten educators because they asked us to,” Švadlena says. There’s no telling what would have happened to his parents if he had.

It was the final straw. It came after months of the StB (Státní bezpečnost, translates to: State security) pressuring Švadlena’s stepfather to become an informant for them. “He worked as a waiter in a Prague restaurant where many artists with anti-regime sentiments would meet,” Švadlena says, “and the secret police agents wanted him to spy on those artists and report the info gathered.” His mother had been anxious since the events of the Prague Spring in 1968, which persuaded her to not only learn Russian as a second language, as was obligatory for Czech citizens under the Soviet regime, but also French and Italian should she need to flee the country. Her preparations paid off on the day she realised the state had turned her own son against her. The family had to escape.

It was at this time that Švadlena would learn to associate travel with survival. “In the summer of that year, 1984, I was sent to a clandestine Boy Scout camp for three weeks,” Švadlena says. “The goal was for me to gain some leg muscles so I wouldn’t start whining when walking long distances.” No one except Švadlena’s aunt was allowed to know about his family’s plans, not even his biological father. “In a society where you were never sure which of your friends were working together with the secret police, it was advisable to remain cautious,” Švadlena says. “And in a society where once you escaped, the secret police would interrogate all members of your family, it was better for them to know nothing [so they could] avoid being persecuted for complicity.” Švadlena remembers that while they were packing for their “holiday” to Yugoslavia, a cop turned up at the door of his family’s home, wanting to make sure they weren’t packing too much.

Soon after, the three family members fled to Austria via Yugoslavia, and then had to wait six months for the Canadian consul to arrange their immigration to Quebec. During this delay, Švadlena encountered frictions that would teach him about unprovoked hostility: “I remember the Austrian parents were demanding that their kids would have priority with seats on the school bus. So Austrian kids would sit while we foreign kids had to stand.” The eventual move to Canada was liberating but not final: the family had to chase after the jobs that Švadlena’s mother could get, which meant frequently skipping between towns, schools, and homes. Then, with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, her job as a writer and speaker in the Czechoslovak section of Radio Canada International closed. The family then moved back to Europe, this time to Germany, where Švadlena would attend his ninth school in as many years.

Now 38-years-old and still living in Germany, Švadlena is spending his time steadily tweaking his driving survival game. It takes place in the deep of night with the player being chased by aggressive and unrelenting pursuers who attempt to crash your vehicle, then attack you with weapons. Švadlena is paying special attention to achieving an accurate simulation of car physics. He wants every bump in the road to be felt in the car’s suspension, giving each drive an unpredictability, as if the road itself is a threat to the player’s life. It’s a passion that was first ignited in 1999 when Švadlena played the racing game Driver. “It had a nice implementation of the car-chase elements from 70s films, which I loved,” he says, “but I was annoyed by the way it cheated on the physics—the cop cars being much heavier and having incredible acceleration and top speed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The game is utterly dark and bleak, the way ahead lit only by the weak headlights. Photograph: Ondřej Švadlena

Those thoughts were buried until 2011, when Švadlena played Test Drive Unlimited 2, and was very disappointed by the car physics, which he calls “atrocious”. It was then that he decided to make his own driving game. He downloaded Unity 3D, checked out its car tutorial project, and started to learn how to manipulate C# scripts. “By the end of 2011, I had made a trailer that I posted on turboduck.net, at that time a forum for Test Drive Unlimited fans, and the feedback being overly positive felt reassuring,” Švadlena says. “I also sent a playable test scene, where you could drive around in a dark landscape to my French producer, and he suggested we apply for the [French] national centre of cinematography multimedia grant, which we got.”

With the 10,000 euros, Švadlena and his producer hired a studio to help build a small prototype, but it was a failure as “the AI was catastrophic”. The issue came from the studio grabbing 9,000 euros for itself while spending 500 euros on a 21-year-old student who hated working on the project to do the programming. “The result was a fucking joke and I had an emotional breakdown,” Švadlena says. “To top it all, I was told that my goal is way too ambitious and technically not possible to achieve.” But Švadlena has a history of fighting against the odds and succeeding, especially when it comes to his art. This wouldn’t stop him.

Švadlena’s first conflict around his art came at kindergarten age. His teacher called in his father to show him that Švadlena had drawn a “brown-coloured mess on paper and had said it was shit.” To this, Švadlena says his father replied, “Yes, that is an accurate depiction of a piece of shit,“ before taking his boy home. The next conflict was more internal. Švadlena quit his classical guitar lessons as he hated them, which encouraged his stepfather to teach him some of the chords for Hotel California, afterwards leaving him to learn the rest and to improvise beyond that. “Learning something my way, by myself, would become an attitude in the future,” Švadlena says. Then in 1996, Švadlena and two other classmates published a school magazine with an illustrated front cover of the school principal in a compromising position with the janitor. “After a slightly awkward internal trial, I was expelled from school but was still allowed to take the final exams. Which I passed,” Švadlena says.

Not long after this, Švadlena’s aunt, who knew a professor at the academy of art, architecture, and design in Prague, encouraged him to take the entrance exams. He was accepted for the famed Animation course along with Jitka Petrová, who is now a children’s book illustrator, and Jakub Dvorský, the founder and director of video game studio Amanita Design. The course was taught by a legend of Czech animation, Jiří Barta, who Švadlena would have his biggest and most important artistic conflict with.

The problem arose in 1998 when Švadlena got his hands on 3D animation software and fell in love. “It seemed to me to be the perfect technique for the kind of worlds I was trying to create,” Švadlena says. However, Barta came from the Czech animation scene of the 1960s, and wanted students to continue its legacy with puppetry, stop-motion, and hand-drawn techniques. Barta thought 3D animation looked plastic and tacky and had nothing to teach Švadlena with it. “Being a very stubborn guy, I just kept on going my own path, and looking back, I probably wanted to prove him wrong. That in fact 3D animation could feel very organic and gritty,” Švadlena says. “I was one of the first students that worked using 3D animation and had to learn everything by myself, mostly without internet access, because there was no one to teach me.”

After graduating, Švadlena went on to produce a number of animated shorts, firstly under Avion Postproduction in Prague, but later as a solo artist starting with the 2006 music video Trik, then Sanitkasan (2007), which was inspired by the doppler effect of an ambulance’s siren, and would form the basis of his approach to game design. He took the sound of the siren and let a world evolve organically around it, creating a free-form animation that, rather than tell a story, delivers emotions through visuals and sound. “I wanted to distance myself from the things I was told while studying animation, the need for a story, narration, and delivering a message,” Švadlena says “My working process involves a lot of daydreaming moments where I see and hear moods with symbolic elements.” His next animation, MRDRCHAIN, premiered at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the biggest of its kind, where it won the Canal+ Award. It was also selected for more than 40 film festivals and won a couple more awards for Švadlena along the way.

It was after an exhausting six years of production on his most ambitious animation, Time Rodent, that Švadlena saw a fresh opportunity in video games. He saw film critic Roger Ebert dismissing the medium as non-art, he saw the push to appeal to non-gamers, and the larger impact of video games on culture and society. So he returned to the driving sim he had started and failed back in 2011. “I began to see the possibility of building immersive worlds where the players would be allowed to absorb the atmosphere at their own pace—that made much more sense to me,” he says.

At first, it branched off from the world of Time Rodent, letting players explore and understand it a little more. But then the game took on its own identity so that the only remaining connection now is that it takes place in a world with no direct sunlight and one of its central themes is our dependency on energy.

With little programming knowledge, one of Švadlena’s biggest challenges has been working on the AI for his driving game. First, he learned how car chases were typically programmed in videogames, only to learn that it wouldn’t suit his needs. And so, “through observation and analysis of real-life driving behaviours, I slowly began implementing a system which is suitable for situations where you need to anticipate, like driving on the limit during car chases,” Švadlena says. Tweaking the AI has been a process of curiosity, experimentation, and patience, exploring the “endless outcomes of the way shock-absorber stiffness and length, stabiliser bar stiffness, car weight and centre of gravity and tyre properties act together resulting in substantial differences in the driving behaviour.” Sometimes, intuition would prove surprisingly effective, such as the time Švadlena got the idea to implement the PIT manoeuvre that enemies use to turn the player’s car, which he managed to get to work on the first iteration. For the car physics, Švadlena has used a custom car physics middleware which, after research and testing, “in my opinion, has the most convincing tyre friction model,” he says.

Švadlena is going to put out a tech demo next summer and hopes to have the game finished in the next two years. Windows and Mac are priority platforms, Linux and consoles are possibilities – “but that largely depends on how painful and costly it would be to port the game to those platforms,” he says. He’s also considering VR support.

The game still doesn’t have a title, but the videos Švadlena has released, with their dark, haunting images of estate cars duelling on endless highways, have provoked the interest of the specialist press. The idea of merging the driving and survival horror genres is so intriguing, and in some ways so obvious – all horror games are about escape. But perhaps it took someone who has had to make such a journey to understand and portray the fear and solitude of the open road.