Wheelsprung

Christa Mrgan: It’s a dream come true: you’re a squirrel in a house full of nuts! You can have them, but you’ll have to be fast and flexible. That’s where your dirt bike comes in! Get ready to flip, weave, and launch yourself through obstacle-filled courses in a whimsical, hand-drawn world.

Welcome to the Playdate Podcast. Bring you stories from game designers, developers, and the team behind Playdate, the little yellow game console with a crank. I’m Christa Mrgan.

Today I’m talking with Nino van Hooff and Julie Bjørnskov, creators of the wacky physics platformer Wheelsprung. Both Nino and Julie have created fantastic games for Playdate, but this is their first time joining forces.

And just a heads up that this episode does contain some light spoilers for the game’s narrative elements, gameplay, mechanics, and a couple of the levels.

Okay. Let’s meet Nino and Julie and let them tell us about their game.

Nino van Hooff: My name is Nino and I did the programming on Wheelsprung. I also did a bit of the organizing. Who knew making Excel sheets could be fun?

Julie Bjørnskov: And My name is Julie, and I created the art and the music and helped a bit with some level design.

Nino van Hooff: So in Wheelsprung, you play as a squirrel on a dirt bike.

Julie Bjørnskov: It’s a story about a squirrel named Flip. We called him Flip. We have a lot of discussion of the name, but it ended up with Flip, And I think it’s really nice because he’s flipping a bit around in this game.

And he lives nearby a nut-loving family. And one day, they come home from the nut shop. They have just collected a lot of nuts. And they have two kids. And the youngest daughter is just really excited about the nuts. She’s just like, throwing them all over the house and Flip is like looking from outside into the house.

And he’s really excited about all these nuts in the house. He wants to collect them fast and eat them fast, and he’s not fast enough. Then he stumble upon this toy bike and then he can grab them even faster.

Nino van Hooff: Yeah. Uh, You collect nuts and get to the end of the level. And there are multiple obstacles. Some of them can move. It’s a bit of a racing, bit of a platformer kind of game. You have an edge if you know a lot about physics, or at least some intuition. One example is that there would be a ramp in the game and you can jump over it, but then you will be spending a lot of time in the air. If instead you make a back flip over the ramp, you gain two seconds before having your wheels back on the ground earlier. And that’s a big win there.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the physics in this game are really fun and definitely takes some getting used to. Your dirt bike is very stretchy and springy and kind of elongates and bounces around as you jump. It’s great. Nino took inspiration there from some games he played in high school.

Nino van Hooff: We used to have these games that were very popular. One of them was Elastomania. Which has a lot in common with Wheelsprung. It’s with a dirt bike, which has some weird physics properties.

It’s pretty elastic as well, like the dirt bike in Wheelsprung , and you also do the same kind of tricks. I really wanted that experience on Playdate. So I thought what can I do to make this a game for a handheld console rather than some DOS PC uh, in the library.

The levels in Wheelsprung are generally a bit shorter and I added these physical elements that can move. That’s also a bit of a departure from the original, but mostly it’s about figuring out a single trick and then mastering it and competing against other players on the leaderboard.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the physics of the bike itself have a lot in common with a bike in the Elastomania series. But beyond that, there are lots of differences, in the obstacles and the level designs, and of course, crucially, in the player character.

Julie Bjørnskov: I just immediately thought it could be nice to be tiny. Like riding the bike in a big house and racing around. There’s something about Playdate, which is so small, that yeah, it’s really nice to make like you are a small person inside this Playdate. It’s a theme I have used in all of my games for this. We needed a nice cool character and I think a squirrel is just really awesome. Yeah, and especially when it’s riding the bike, it’s just look cool.

Nino van Hooff: I think we’re pretty aligned on ideas. I don’t ask for a lot of revisions or go completely the other way. That’s very nice in this project also because you of course work in your spare time. So, yeah, that helps to make progress. But we did spend a lot of time figuring out what the name of the squirrel should be. What is pretty funny to me is that we did not actually use that name anywhere in the game, right?

Julie Bjørnskov: Nope! No, it’s just us that know that.

Nino van Hooff: At least if we discuss it together, then we know it’s Flip.

Julie Bjørnskov: Yeah.

Nino van Hooff: Yeah.

it’s a bit of a Lunar Lander in there as well, talking about the old games, but not too much, because it’s arcade, so, it’s pretty forgiving. And a Luna Lander, you have to be spot on.

Also, I think that people who played Gravity Express would be really into Wheelsprung as well.

Christa Mrgan: . Yeah! While Gravity Express doesn’t have the same elasticity physics as Wheelsprung, they both have a similar kind of inertia in their physics.

Nino van Hooff: It just captures that moment in history for me where I was playing with my friends on the library computer. What’s pretty funny is that the library I used for the physics is called Chipmunk, which is a complete coincidence.

Christa Mrgan: That’s so perfect.

Nino van Hooff: It was just the thing that was there around the year 2000, and that also reinforces that feeling that it brings you back to that time because the last version of that library was released in 2007. It has just been set in stone ever since. Just a monument of time.

Christa Mrgan: That’s so cool. But let’s talk about how we got here. Nino, first learned about Playdate when it was announced, and he remembers hearing about it at work and talking about it with coworkers.

Nino van Hooff: I work at a company which is kind of like Panic, so we were, immediately enthusiastic about it.

This was way before the device got released. As we all know, that took some time. But yeah, I put it on my, calendar to watch out for it subscribe to the newsletter.

Christa Mrgan: And Julie found out about it through Teenage Engineering, the powerhouse consumer electronics and synthesizer company that designed Playdate’s hardware, and whose CEO actually came up with the idea for Playdate’s iconic crank!

Julie Bjørnskov: I played a lot of electronic music and had always loved the instrument by Teenage Engineering, so it’s actually through them I just find out about the Playdate. Me and my husband bought a lot of their stuff, and then we also bought the Playdate. I think it took a year before we got it. And then just when we see it, was just like, it was so nice. And I think instantly we just wanted to make a game for it.

Christa Mrgan: Nino, too. And he started out with a port of an existing game he’d made years earlier.

Nino van Hooff: Yeah, making a game for It was straightforward because the first game I made, that game I already made in 2005 for the PlayStation Portable, and it was written in Lua, which is one of the languages you can use for Playdate games.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. You can write games in Lua, which is a lighter weight, friendlier scripting language. Or you can write games in C, which is a lower level language that’s maybe a bit more unwieldy, but which can be a good choice for performance reasons. You can also mix and match.

Nino van Hooff: My other game is called Gravity Express, in which you are like a triangular spacecraft flying through huge caverns picking up and delivering cargo. you are hindered by some very nasty obstacles. You have to fly around them. It was credited for being the first game for Playdate with full motion video.

So I got the first prototype up in two days because of the code and all the assets were already there. Then it was another seven months to get it to the Catalog. Pretty straightforward for me. It was very fun to make that.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. And Gravity Express also won Best Action Game in the 2023 Playdate Community Awards.

Julie Bjørnskov: And I have made, three games before this, Escape the Arcade and Escape the Board Game, they’re casual puzzle games with a lot of like comics in them. And then I also make Dance Break Dance. It’s a rhythm game where you just need to dance and when the music stops, you need to stop. So you’re cranking really fast, and when the music stops, you stop cranking and stop dancing.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah. And Escape the Arcade, which Julie made with her husband Anders won Best Leap of Faith in the 2025 Danish Game Awards. And Julie met Nino on the Playdate Squad Discord, which is a rad community of Playdate creators and enthusiasts.

Nino van Hooff: So we are, both in discord, right? And I think I already was underway for about half a year, postponing things that required art, sound design, or music. I think my collaboration request was up for some time when Julie finally responded. Then we found each other.

Julie Bjørnskov: Yeah, I just, i think it’s actually was my husband that found the post. I think like it’s really difficult to find your way in Discord. There’s so many threads and he was just sending me, okay, this guy needs some art. I think I’d just finished Escape the Arcade, and maybe also Dance Break Dance at that moment. And I was like, free to make something new.

Nino van Hooff: I had Already seen your video of you and your husband sharing a single chair to make a game. In one corner of the room, there was a keyboard. In the other corner of the room, there was a keyboard to program your games. I was like, oh yeah, that’s the cutest thing. I’m a big fan of both of you actually.

Julie Bjørnskov: Haha, thanks.

Nino van Hooff: And actually, Anders, Julie’s husband helped out, of course also with Wheelsprung to program the bits of the comic book story that’s in there. Thank you Anders!

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, thanks Anders. And, Anders created the comic book cut scenes in the game using Panels, a system created by Cadin Batrack and which is generously available to other Playdate developers. And Nino designed the game using a level editor that he created, and which you can use to create your own levels for Wheelsprung! There are links to Nino’s editor, and to Panels, and to a bunch of other great stuff, in the show notes.

So, Wheelsprung has 34 meticulously-crafted levels.

Nino van Hooff: I made most of the designs, and the core of a level design is to have a single trick. That is important because you want to have these levels be short so they can be played for a short session in the bus, or waiting in a queue because it’s on a handheld.

So I wanted the levels to be completable once you got the trick in like under 30 seconds and most are actually under 15 I think. It’s a single trick because there are no checkpoints in the levels. it would be frustrating if you find something out that is really difficult to do and then smack into a wall and you have to start over again. So usually the difficult part of a level is at the start. So that you don’t lose a lot of time and effort restarting the level every time. The first trick to find out is how to, push the troll and maybe tricks later in the game are how to flip backwards to avoid maybe a spike ball or to do a looping, there’s a bit of buildup in there. And then when you get all the movements under your belt, then there are maybe movable objects in the world. So that’s how you introduce that gradually. And then there are the happy accidents which make for the best levels. Where you accidentally find out something that may or may not work in the world. because it’s all a physics simulation, something just might happen. So let’s say that these spike balls, they are very mature enemy. When you touch them, it’s game over. I just thought like, I want this variation where, if your enemies are your friends. So how can I use these spike balls to make you progress in a level? And I found a way where you can combine a spike ball and a book to get you there.

Christa Mrgan: And while Julie contributed to some of the level designs, she mainly focused on the art, music, and sound design.

Julie Bjørnskov: I have made a lot of games for the Playdate, and I think somehow i just got my own style. I just keep evolving on this style. i wanted to make it feel fun and playful with a lot of personality in it. Normally I draw like with a lot of colors and so it’s like how to make some kind of colorful, without that just having no colors. You just have the pixels, if it’s black or white. it’s really challenging to make it interesting and playful.

So I think it’s been a lot of work for me to bring my like hand-drawn style into it. And i think It just play round with a lot of brushes and I found a brush when I feel it’s like I’m getting there, with the pixel art. And I think it’s really fun because like every pixel really matters.

So it matters if I put it there and there or there. And I’ll also play out with the dithering.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, since there’s only black and white to work with in one-bit, dithering can help create the illusion of shades of gray by spacing out black and white pixels in different patterns. It’s similar to crosshatching in drawing.

Julie Bjørnskov: It can be, like, challenging with some of the dithering that just make it flicker. But I think it’s nice to play with. And I only used, two patterns of dithering in this game, but I think they’re really effectful when they’re being used.

Nino van Hooff: I think the smallest canvases to draw in were the individual limbs for Flip the squirrel. So you have a torso and a head and a upper arm and a lower arm and upper leg and a lower leg. they are all individual drawings. the lower arm may be like 11 by four pixels.

it blows my mind how that still can add up to some personality. How many options do you have to fill in such a small canvas?

Julie Bjørnskov: Yeah, it was really fun to see you have made one, and then I just changed, a few pixels, and then it was so different from what you made, but it’s so few pixels that was changed. And then the tail, it just make a lot to it, I think.

Nino van Hooff: Yeah, We, got that idea at the same time that it needs to have a tail. And of course it’s very springy in this physical world and super fun and nice.

I really love the art because in most games, levels are built up of tiles and repetitions of the same patterns, but every level in Wheelsprung is unique.

Like it’s just a very big drawing. So you will have very personal and unique touches to each level. Like, uh, I can remember there’s a snow globe that appears in a few places in Wheelsprung and the snow globe has a little tiny house in it, and there is a painting on the wall as part of this world where we are playing inside of a house, right?

So there are paintings on the wall, but in the painting there is this infinity mirror effect where you see another squirrel on a bike riding through the level. And maybe you can imagine on a scale of two by two pixels, that in that painting, again, there is this other repetition of a level with a squirrel in it riding a bike.

It’s so super nice. I would actually recommend everyone to just play the whole game a second time, just admiring the levels, just driving really slowly. There’s a lot to discover there. All kinds of hints, also.

Christa Mrgan: Yeah, the art is great. It’s super cute and there are a ton of fun details. And of course, Julie composed the music and did most of the sound design too.

Julie Bjørnskov: It was like a collaboration with me and Nino. I composed the music, but he guided me. He just sent me like a bunch of reference and it was really cool and inspiring and with all this input, I created this soundtrack, and I think it ended up being really cool.

Nino van Hooff: I just. Made a really random playlist on Spotify, I think. It had a lot of saxophones in it. It was really positive and it has a bit of a beat and a rhythm to it. To be honest, I was a bit hesitant about having music in the game at all because, this would be a game where there would be a lot of trial and error.

And you sometimes really need to focus on executing this perfect move and then having a soundtrack on repeat in the background that could maybe distract or start to be annoying. But I really am happy with the result that we ended up with, where the soundtrack is for the level select screen so you don’t hear it constantly.

And it really has something, this soundtrack, because usually I will get bored with the soundtrack if I hear it multiple times, but this really grows on you. I was programming and vibing to this track, and I I like it more every time I listen to it.

It’s great.

Julie Bjørnskov: Oh, thank you. I think it’s some kind of electro swing genre maybe.

Nino van Hooff: The swing parts is really in there.

Christa Mrgan: And the little squeal from the squirrel is Julie.

Julie Bjørnskov: Yeah, it was fun to record them. that’s actually me screaming. And just pitch it afterward. I was home alone at that time, so that was fine. It must have sound really nice without the pitching and stuff. Just me like screaming weird.

So, um, yeah, I also did like most of the sound design. That was some of the hardest part because it was really challenging to to get the right sounds for everything. i just come up with like lots of sounds for everything and some of them just really didn’t work. And then the end, I think we found some sounds that work for everything, but I think it was one of the things that took a lot of time. With the art and music, I sent it to Nino, he was like, “whoa, that’s cool! Let’s do that.” And with the sound, we just have like, it back and forth a bit more.

Nino van Hooff: I think this was the subject where we had to iterate most. I remember one sound effect for when you had an obstacle and it would be game over. And it, reminded me of a twig or a branch of a tree snapping. And I was like, “oh, that may be a bit too close to bones cracking” or something like that.

I wanted it to be positive and playful and suitable for everyone. So, yeah, then I was like, oh, maybe we can do instruments on a drum set, a crash cymbal or a tom and that worked much better.

Julie Bjørnskov: Yeah, so I think the sound design is like, sounds from the soundtrack, and that really works for it. Yeah.

Nino van Hooff: And the movable objects like the bowling ball, a marble, and a tennis ball, those are the actual sounds that those kind of things make. I just recorded it with my dad at our parents’ home. Super fun to do.

It’s different play testing games than what I do during my day job, which is making Android apps for smartphones. If you do a user test, you can set them up like, “oh, you already have logged in your account bought something ,and want to return it, and here’s the app. Go do it.” You can’t just say to a person, “you have played this game for an hour already. You’re super skilled. Now play my final level and see what you think of it.” So yeah, there’s a bit of a grad in that, like the first. 10 levels have been played super many times, and the later levels only my best friends I could ask to please play these levels.

But it worked out really well. my neighbor, played the game for two hours and he thought that, what? Only half an hour passed. And I thought maybe you need a break, man. only when he put down the Playdate, which is maybe not the most ergonomic console that he almost couldn’t move his fingers individually.

but he really enjoyed it. He was in that mindset that I want people to be like, “oh, let me try two more times. I think I got it.” The sense of competition and also the feeling that, some improvement no matter how small, could get you back on top of the leaderboard or achieve some small goal so that you can then be happy and move about your day, and then maybe later get back to it and improve some more once you found out someone else beat your score. Also finding out that the way you’ve been trying to improve the same way over and over again gets you very small increments in your score, but then when you think of some completely different way, like maybe a back flip instead of a front flip, at some point you’ll be two seconds faster because you find another way and you can feel very smart about yourself.

Christa Mrgan: But it’s not all about the leaderboards! Julie hopes people still enjoy the game even if they never really get that great at playing it.

Julie Bjørnskov: Yeah, I just really hope that they also will enjoy the writing. So even though it doesn’t go very well if they can just enjoy the art and like having a good time with it also. You don’t have to be really good. You can just take your time and enjoy it if you want.

Nino van Hooff: So I have this Excel sheet where all the levels are in there, and I can kinda continuously reorder them so that they are in a order that has an increasing learning curve, but it is not too steep. At some point I was getting so good at playing the game that I just couldn’t make easy levels anymore. And at that moment I asked Julie, Hey, could you have a fresh take at this? Try your best to not do stuff in a very complex way. And refined the levels. But yeah, that really helped as well. She just made some basic levels and we could also interject that into this learning curve, even if you want to have a generally increasing level of difficulty, you also want a moment to relax after you have had some particularly difficult level, you can just come back to some track you learned previously. For example, level five is a laundry machine where you do a loop, and then level, 20 is the same concept, but you need to do it four times. That may be almost the same, but also not quite. With the laundry machine level, you just have to do a half loop. In the other level, you need to get that momentum going so you keep going round and round to get a good score. So you know already when you see that level for the first time that you can do it. It’s just that you need to get the hang of it a bit.

There’s a game called Trackmania, where the focus is most on, on shaving of like tens or thousandths of your time competing against each other and against yourself. Also, you can see your ghost— a copy of your previous attempts at cracking the top score. And that you’ll see in Wheelsprung as well. I made it kind of seamless in the sense that, leaderboard updates happen in the background. You first make a few attempts at beating your own score, and then when you’re done, the leaderboards will be downloaded and you com compare against all the other people in the community.

And then maybe, see what you can improve there. I hope people will be really drawn into this and think, " it’s almost dinner time, but maybe I can have maybe two more attempts." Then the next morning in the shower they will think maybe I can do this or that differently.

And then, also I’m really looking forward to whether someone can beat me, of course.

Julie Bjørnskov: No, I haven’t completed the levels yet.

Julie Bjørnskov: Our teamwork has been amazing. Even though we live in two different countries and our communication have been over Discord, I think it’s been really smooth. Yeah, Nino is just really nice to organize and planning and making all these Excel sheets. It’s given me a creative space where I could just do my art and the music and just like focus at what I do best without like, having to think about, does this make sense compared to this? He organized everything, and we have a big Trello board. I could just go and look, okay, now I need to do this, and now I need to do this. I really enjoy that process, because I don’t have to think about all this planning stuff.

Nino van Hooff: It was really nice collaborating with Julie after I finished my first game, Gravity Express, I was actually doubting whatever I wanted to do any other game because it’s such a big investment. Like it’s your free time for a year, that’s basically what you commit to.

And then having to organize all that, wearing seven different hats because you’re a script writer, you’re a cameraman, you’re a programmer. You need to do something about the art, but you can’t do the art yourself. So you’ll hire someone else. And for every piece of art, you hire someone else again, so you need to explain the vision again. So it was really nice to just collaborate with someone whose art style I already know from the get go that, oh, I like that. And I, we, we can just agree on stuff easily. It’s the first experience for me being a project manager, and I Googled at some point, " How to collaborate with Danish people? " It said " Danish people are the same people as Dutch people, you are just compatible." So I guess, okay, we’ll do it like I usually do and it worked out really well.

Julie Bjørnskov: Nice that you Googled it.

Nino van Hooff: The idea for Playdate, where the name comes from, I guess, is that people all over the world get together to play the same game at the same time. But with Season One that you get when buying Playdate, that wasn’t possible because there were production issues and it was not possible for everyone to have them at the same time.

So when the final release date for the Playdate came, some people were still on the waiting list and they changed it. Season One for everyone would start at the moment where they would unbox their Playdate. So this idea of playing together did not come true because some person would be in the first episode of the Season, while other people already had received their Playdate earlier, and were already in episode five.

So yeah, I really hope we will have these unwrapping parties. We’ll sync up with their time zones and be unwrapping their games. That would be great.

Christa Mrgan: Yes. The dream of Playdate is alive, and I love that this is happening with Season Two! And it’s been so cool to see people discover and play the games at the same time. And we’re only on week two, so there’s a lot more to come.

But I hope you enjoy flipping your dirt bike as Flip the Squirrel, and scoring those nuts as you discover the playful, adorable world of Wheelsprung.

Thanks so much for listening and stay tuned for more episodes from Playdate Season Two coming soon to the Playdate Podcast feed.

Nino van Hooff: Thanks for listening.

Julie Bjørnskov: Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Christa Mrgan: The Playdate Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Christa Mrgan.

Cabel Sasser, and Simon Panrucker composed the theme song. Additional music was composed by Julie Bjørnskov and comes from Wheelsprung. Huge thanks to Tim Coulter and Ashur Cabrera for wrangling the podcast feed and working on the website, James Moore for making me an awesome Paydate audio extraction app, Kaleigh Stegman for handling social media, and Neven Mrgan, who created the podcast artwork and site design. And thanks as always to everyone at Panic. Playdate Season Two is available right now on the website and on Catalog! And of course, Playdate consoles are available at play.date.

Nino van Hooff: My plan is to be the absolute worst during the first week of the release. That gives me two things: first, gives everyone a chance to shine. Their are 15 seconds of fame, maybe. And the other thing is that if I’m at the bottom of the leaderboards, my rank in the game will be the total amount of players because I will be at the bottom. I’d really like to see how many people will catch on. Watch out for me in the second week, where I’ll improve!