Made with Unity, despelote is one of the most charming games of 2025, offering a nostalgic glimpse into a key moment in Ecuador’s history – qualifying for the 2002 FIFA World Cup – as seen through the eyes of a child. We interviewed the game’s designer and programmer, Julián Cordero, to get insights into despelote’s development and the intentional design decisions behind this game that plays like a memory.
Growing up in Quito, Ecuador, game designer Julián Codero was fully immersed in soccer (futból) culture, seeing the sport bring people of all ages and backgrounds together in the city’s parks, streets, and neighborhoods. Moving to New York years later, he joined a pick-up league and was surprised at how emotional he felt kicking a ball around with a group of strangers. “I was getting to meet all these people without even talking – we were just communicating through passing the ball back and forth,” he says. “I thought that was really special.”
This experience, along with a desire to put Ecuador’s game development scene on the map, kicked off the idea for despelote, “a game about soccer.”
despelote takes place in 2001, the year Ecuador qualified for the 2002 FIFA World Cup. The game is semiautobiographical, with players hopping into the sneakers of an eight-year-old Julián to kick a ball around Quito’s parks and neighborhoods. Julián began work on the project solo as a designer and programmer, but soon brought in artist and musician Sebastián Valbuena, sound designer Ian Berman, and producer, level designer, and occasional team therapist Gabe Cuzillo.
The first few months of development were focused on the core mechanic and making the experience of kicking the soccer ball feel very physical and fun to play. It was during this iteration phase that Julián realized that maybe, despelote wasn’t just a game about soccer.
“Playing early builds, I realized it felt really good to be focused on the ball but overhearing conversations around me, and I thought that was a really compelling way of absorbing the world,” he says. Through this creative exploration mechanic, players dribble the ball around Quito, eavesdropping on conversations and interacting with different characters through the universal – and at times mischievous – language of play.
despelote has very few rules, and little is provided in the way of direction. Each interaction and scenario, whether that’s kicking the ball into the middle of a picnic date or rescuing it from a tree’s upper branches, is the result of experimentation. Surprisingly, Julián says one of despelote’s biggest design challenges was helping people grasp this concept of free play: “Players were like, ‘This world is super cool, but what am I supposed to do?’”
Typical solutions like objectives and task lists contradicted the free-flowing childlike experience he wanted to recreate. His solution? Giving players a watch and putting them on the clock – with two in-game hours until they need to be home for dinner.
“This was the big breakthrough in development, with a clear before and after in playtests,” he explains. “All of a sudden players were like, ‘Oh, now I understand… The game will progress no matter where I am or what I’m doing!’ The watch allowed them to absorb the game in a much more natural way.”
If despelote’s narrative gameplay stems from Julián’s personal experiences, its visual identity owes much to Sebastián Valbuena, a musician and artist who Julián grew up with in Quito. Known for his dreamlike, hand-drawn 2D illustrations and animations, Sebastián was perfectly at home working on despelote’s 2D sprites, but it was up to Julián to figure out how to bring the full aesthetic into the game. “Sebastián had never worked in 3D before – he’d actually never opened in Blender in his life,” says Julián. “But his art was so beautiful, so I spent a lot of time thinking how to translate that into a 3D world.”
despelote’s environments consist of 3D scans of buildings and parks in Quito. While it’s not a 1:1 recreation, the scenery will be recognizable to anyone familiar with the city. The 3D scans are overlaid with a custom noise shader built in Amplify Shader Editor that imitates the characteristic textured backgrounds in Sebastián’s work. The result is a striking visual contrast, with black-and-white illustrated characters and objects standing out against grainy, pastel-tinted photographic backdrops.
This aesthetic is a clever way to blend realism and nostalgia, as well as a deft design decision that clearly establishes how players can engage with the gameworld. “Everything that’s black-and-white is interactive, so players are naturally drawn towards that,” says Julián. “It gave us the freedom to do whatever we wanted with the backgrounds, and it was fun to play with that dynamic.”
Landing this look wasn’t without its challenges, though. “Working on the noise shader was a nightmare!” says Julián. “I had to make sure the grains were never smaller than a pixel, or it’d make players dizzy. I spent weeks tweaking it to keep the aesthetic intact without compromising performance – seriously, I’d look up from my laptop and my whole world was noise, like I was in the world of the game. It was exhausting, but also incredibly rewarding when it finally worked.”
despelote’s emotional texture doesn’t just come from its visuals, but from its bespoke approach to sound design, which won the prize for Excellence in Audio at the 2025 Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards. The game leverages positional audio, with voices and sound effects becoming clearer based on the player’s proximity to the source.
Julián worked with Ian Berman to record ambient noise and dialog on-site in Quito, enlisting friends, family, and random strangers on the street to lend their voices to the game. While some rough guidelines were provided, none of the game’s dialog is scripted, and many of the game’s scenarios arose organically from these recordings.
“To give a specific example, there was a random group of kids we mic’d up and asked to play soccer,” says Julián. “One of them was wearing these bright white pants, and he fell on the ground and got them dirty, and all of the other kids fell along with him, laughing. I was really excited to incorporate that moment into the game.”
Besides having the practical element of not having to write hours of dialog, this approach meant the team could create an experience that itself functions like a memory, rich with subjective recollections and anecdotes provided by its volunteer cast. “I was only four or five years old in 2001, so I have this idealized perspective of this moment,” Julián explains. “When I asked people, like my parents, to record this improvised dialogue, they brought out other memories from that time that I could never have written.”
From barking dogs in the background to vendors selling cevichochos (a local snack), despelote is packed with small details that ground the story in Ecuadorian life. But the game resonates so profoundly because it doesn’t just tell one story about a specific moment – it’s more like a tapestry of collected experiences. This is what gives despelote a uniquely nostalgic flavor not often seen in video games, with some reviewers saying it “might be the best game ever about childhood.”
For Julián and his parents, who both contributed voiceovers to the game, despelote has been an especially personal project. Although they’re divorced in the present day, his parents agreed to act like they were together for the 2001 setting. “It was very vulnerable of them to do that,” Julián said, noting that – at the time of the interview – they hadn’t played despelote together yet. “I want to be there with them when they see it. It’s a moment I’ve been saving.”
Reflecting on the game’s reception and accolades at the Independent Games Festival – which included four nominations including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Nuovo Award, Excellence in Narrative, and their win for Excellence in Audio – Julián expresses sincere gratitude from the whole team.
“It was really nice for the four of us to be there together, celebrating what we’d done and appreciating each other. We've been working on despelote for almost seven years, so to see players connect to what we’ve made is so validating,” he says. “People have told us that despelote makes them feel like kids again, and that is really the vibe.”
despelote is out now on PC, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®5, and Xbox Series X|S. Check the game out now on Steam, and explore more stories from Unity’s developer community in our Resources hub.
