A shared drive instead of a match
Yugo: the non-game is a virtual space built around driving, radio, and conversation. There are no goals to chase and no objectives to clear. One person starts a session and takes the wheel of a Yugo, the iconic car produced in Yugoslavia in the 1980s. The roads are serpentine and mountainous, inspired by the routes from Kosovo to Montenegro. The environment is abstract and contextless, but it carries clear traces of a time and place: dusks reminiscent of Kosovo, crows flying back to their nests for the night, and monolithic objects on hills inspired by Socialist-era Yugoslavian monuments in Kosovo and the rest of ex-Yugoslavia.
How your group hangs out together
Everyone who joins a session is seated in one of the three passenger seats, so a session holds the driver and up to three passengers. Players are connected through voice chat automatically, which makes it a place for long conversations that are harder to have when talking over digital voice chat between matches. It works as a non-gamification of those usual voice chat sessions: you drive, you listen, you talk. The radio stations are real-life internet radio streams, several available by default, and players can add or remove stations. Version 2.0 also lets you add your own real-life radio stations from a provided database of radio stream URLs, so everyone in the car hears the same station.
Before you start
Sessions can be joined from a list of ongoing public sessions or at random, not only from friends, which opens the door to spontaneous interactions with new players. The game is tagged as singleplayer as well as co-op, so you can also drive alone. Expect a relaxed, atmospheric space with dialogue at the center rather than a challenge to overcome. The visual style is retro, minimalist, colorful, and abstract, with a 3D environment that blurs time and place.