One of 2025’s most captivating narrative games was Despelote, focusing on life in a small Ecuadorian community circa 2001. Equal parts semi-biographical story and an immersive dive into a time long past, Despelote is a slice-of-life experience following Julián and his love for football (soccer) as he bonds with the community at large. This gives way to surprisingly evocative and realistic encounters with various characters who share a love of the game and the same curiosities Julián has about the world around him.
During GDC Festival of Gaming 2026, game creator and lead developer Julián Cordero spoke about making Despelote and how they pulled off an interactive slice-of-life story. Alongside sharing his own stories growing up in Ecuador and how football was a unifying experience across the community, he revealed that during their performance capture for the game, improvisation led to more authentic, lifelike scenarios, further enhancing the game’s sense of realism.
“I found that kicking a ball around is kind of a universal language, you can really get to know somebody by kicking a ball back and forth with them without saying a word,” said Cordero during the panel. “There are so many social dynamics around it that translate to real life, and so it was a way of interacting with people that aren’t present in my life anymore.”
Cordero was inspired by a picture book called Magnum Football, which his grandmother gave him in his youth. The book showed football being played by people from around the globe, kicking a football in various areas of their communities, often where there were no fields to play on. They really showed a sense of community across different cultures, and how kicking a ball with others was a bonding activity. Cordero related to this as a young man growing up in Ecuador and wanted to make a game about community, exploring their town and bonding over football.
In the early stages, Cordero made prototypes without any NPC voiceover and focused solely on communicating through the act of kicking around—in keeping with his idea that kicking the ball is a universal language. However, it became clear that this would create issues communicating gameplay ideas. This led the developers to open NPC expressions, which expanded the setting of 2001 Ecuador even further.
According to Cordero, he was initially hesitant about having NPC chatter in the game, but early tests with his real-life friends and support from game producer and NYU professor Gabe Cuzzillo made him more open to the idea of using voice-overs.
“After long discussions with our producer, Gabe Cuzzillo, he finally convinced me to try using dialogue for the characters, but under the conditions that I wouldn’t write any of it and that it be improvised,” said Cordero. “Ideally, this dialogue would exist only in the background, bringing in some of the same context we were getting from the interviews, but in a more seamless way. So I got my friends together on a video call and recorded them having a normal conversation, and I just put it into the game right next to where you would be kicking the ball around.”
Voices in the crowd
This prototype turned out to be very successful for the development team and opened the way for them to pursue making the game in full. By giving background characters more activity and emphasizing ambient audio to set the tone of 2001 Ecuador, Despelote gained a greater sense of atmosphere. According to Cordero, the early recording sessions for the game helped shape Despelote‘s style, which draws on the neorealist movement in film.
“The first test I showed was so successful that we committed to dialogue in the game being completely improvised,” said Cordero. “We gave friends and family different scenarios and reported them chatting about soccer, politics, and daily life, so that we could absorb them as they ran around the park. We attempted to report in as natural a location as possible, and were surprised by how easy it felt for people to just start talking and bring so much of themselves to the recordings.”
One added benefit, but also a challenge, that came from using improvised chatter is that some lines would end up making scenes a bit more interesting than expected. In one instance in the game, a group of kids would tease the player about having a girlfriend, in the vein of schoolyard banter. This line, like the rest of the game, was improvised and was well received by the developers. They decided to include it in the game, but that also meant that they had to build new assets to match the game with the new scenario.
“I didn’t think that the kids would tease the player as much as they did—they came up with all of that,” said Cordero. “With this girlfriend scenario, we had no way of having players try to communicate in the game, so we had to slightly adjust their behavior. In the game, they crowd over you during this conversation, and we even have to have someone pretend to see someone that is your girlfriend. So this kind of approach made it feel like whatever happened in the real world was in conversation with the game’s design. It was very freeing to see this, the game became alive during the recording sessions.”
What made Despelote such a memorable experience for many was its minimalist approach to a narrative-driven game, emphasizing immersion in a world where players simply kick a football and listen to the noises and chatter around them.
According to Cordero, another major influence on the game he cited was game designer and video game educator Robert Yang, who wrote a blog post about the need for more neorealism in video games. Despelote‘s creator found this to be an incredibly influential piece of game criticism.
“In his blog post, he talks about the idea of realism in games, and how we usually think of it as photorealism and simulation in AAA video games—but this shouldn’t be the only way to approach it,” said Cordero. “Thinking about realism as documentation allows for unexpected textures, ideas, and stories to proceed into the game. I found this personally. Through the process of making this game, I was able to document all these places that I miss so much, living in New York, and reminisce with my friends about the fun things we did as kids.”
“We watched hours of footage of the national team playing soccer over the years, and got people to tell me what it was like when I was too young to remember, and got my parents to tell me what it was like when they were still together,” he said. “So I was able to find all this meaning through this approach, and whether I intended it or not, it is embedded deep in the game.”
Game Developer and GDC Festival of Gaming are sibling organizations under Informa Festivals.