Spinning limousines, or: drawing your ideas from unusual places

No Goblin -- the new studio founded by former Harmonix developer Dan Teasdale -- showed off the trailer for its first game today, Roundabout. In addition to the charming retro TV ad style for the trailer, the game features an idiosyncratic mechanic: players navigate a spinning limousine, colliding with pedestrians and avoiding roadblocks to maintain the vehicle's momentum and rack up points. "There's actually a lot of bits and pieces from various games that inspired the whole package," Teasdale tells Gamasutra. The game's central feature draws from a fairly obscure Game Boy Advance title, Kuru Kuru Kururin, developed by Japanese studio Eighting -- quite fitting, as the whimsical action and soundtrack featured in the trailer might remind one of Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy. Other points of reference for No Goblin include Crazy Taxi and Tony Hawk. The intended result is something of the breakneck city driving of Crazy Taxi with a penchant for score multipliers and hitting secondary objectives (often literally). "The idea of taking that very simple mechanic [from Kururin] and blowing it out in a completely different direction has been in the back of my head for a while," says Teasdale. "Once we made the leap from Kururin's 'spinning stick through some levels' to Roundabout's 'spinning limousine in an open world', everything else like the '70s setting [seen in the trailer] began to naturally fit into place."