Hey,
I’m Mark Essen, creative director at Messhof. We’re really excited for you to jump into Wheel World when it launches later this month on July 23. We’ve been working on it for years, and it’s finally almost ready.
At its heart, Wheel World is a game about riding bikes through a giant open world, finding secrets, collecting weird parts, and building your dream ride. Early on we tried all kinds of ideas: delivery missions, long-distance rides with stamina management, hill climbs. But what stuck with us the most was the feeling of spotting AI cyclists on the road, drafting behind them, and timing your slingshot to leapfrog forward. It felt good every time.
Racing is a big part of the game, but it’s not the whole picture. This world is full of people who ride for fun, not just to win. Each neighborhood has its own local legends who ride the roads nearby. We wanted the game to feel informal and unsanctioned. Something more organic. You learn an area by riding its races. After doing a few in the Farmlands, you’ll be ready to take on the boss of that region, whose route pulls pieces from the other races you’ve already seen.
To make this kind of world work, we built a tool that helps us quickly shape and reshape large open spaces. Every road is its own asset, with properties like width, texture, traffic settings, and car speed. Designers can lay down a few nodes, connect them, and the game fills in the terrain automatically. This let us test ideas quickly. We could sketch out a race, try it, and then drop it into the main world once it felt right. We spaced races out so that exploring between them felt natural. We also thought a lot about visual flow. We made sure that no matter where you were, you could always see something cool in the distance. It might be Velo City up on the hill, the Rooster DeGallo statue in the Farmlands, or the coastal lighthouse in the Preserve.
Sometimes we’d find areas that didn’t feel like much, even though you passed through them often. Rather than stuffing in more content, we could just shift the roads around and the terrain would adapt. This worked great early on when a lot of the environment was still procedural. Later in development, as we hand-decorated more of the world, we locked down those areas and planned more carefully. We gave extra attention to the places where players might run into NPC bike gangs, making sure they stood out and drew you in.
Getting lost is part of the fun, but we also wanted to give players a way to find their way back. That’s where the Bicycle Bell Shrines come in. These are tall towers that send beams of light into the sky, so you can spot them from far away. When you reach one, it reveals more of the local map and gives you a boost upgrade. You can use them to track where you’ve been and where you still need to explore.
Thanks for reading. We’re thrilled to share Wheel World with you soon. Whether you’re in it for the racing, the bike builds, or just cruising through the countryside, we hope you’ll love the ride.
See you out there
Mark
Creative Director, Messhof