When the team at Codename Entertainment started experimenting with vehicles for Without a Hitch, one reference immediately captured the team’s attention—the iconic and mission-critical Halo Warthog. 

"One of the things that myself and Justin—the other co-founder—and a few of our friends have done for a long time was do nights where we play Halo's Firefight," said Codename Entertainment co-founder David Whittaker. "Some of the maps in there literally had a strategy where you get in the Warthog and you drive around constantly."

The Halo Warthog, complete with its distinctive movement, was a touchpoint during some of the earliest design prototypes for Without a Hitch, Codename Entertainment's wacky cooperative game where you play as a car and complete deliveries. 
 

Starting the googly-eyed car

Without a Hitch doesn't just put players in a car—it makes them a car. Your goal is to traverse the landscape, collect items, and deliver them within short 20-minute sessions—though sometimes, messing around on the procedurally generated map takes priority. It's all about having fun with your friends. 

"One of the things we walked into quite quickly was the idea of cars," said Codename Entertainment CEO Eric Jordan. "And that you as a character would be a car…with googly eyes, and that came together quickly."

Without a Hitch features both solo and cooperative modes, the latter with up to four players, encouraging players to experiment with different strategies while navigating its procedurally generated environments. 

Each run is designed to be unpredictable. The layout of the levels will be different, players can collide and pick each other up, and humor emerges spontaneously from interactions with other participants. Its six-day structure gives players a sense of progression, while also leaving room for surprise, chaos, and emergent stories that are unique to every group.
 

The mechanic behind the car

Codename Entertainment is an independent team based in Victoria, British Columbia. The studio has a history of building engaging live-service games, most notably Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. The licensed title has helped sustain the studio, giving them the freedom to work on other things. 

“We're continually doing the live-service thing, which is nice, as a small studio," Jordan said. "It puts us in a place that I think is a real spot of luxury where we can experiment with different game ideas.”

This freedom has been critical in shaping Without a Hitch. Many of the ideas that appear in the game originated in experimentation with 3D spaces, physics-driven environments, and social interaction mechanics. After seeing the success of physics-heavy multiplayer games like Peak and R.E.P.O. in 2025, the team realized there was room to innovate by combining humor, vehicle physics, and emergent multiplayer moments into a cohesive experience. 

The team emphasized that what made those games successful was having easy fun with those that are close to you.

"You can kind-of just drop in and start playing," Jordan said. "And you want to have the session length not be something where you're going for hours and hours. It should be something you can do with your friends in a couple of hours and go. That was a lot of fun."
 

Starting the car without a hitch

The earliest prototypes of Without a Hitch were simple. The development team wanted something silly that could build moments with interconnected systems, some not involving gameplay whatsoever. 

 “I think the first prototype was just driving a car around with other people and proximity chat and moving and chatting and stuff, and those pieces clicked pretty quick," Whittaker said. Things escalated from there, drawing from inspirations like Rocket League and Mario Kart to make the gameplay stand out in every session.

These early tests showed the power of social systems in emergent fun. Driving itself was entertaining, but adding object manipulation, cooperative challenges, and chat features transformed simple mechanics into moments of delight. The team discovered that even minor design tweaks could dramatically change the way players experienced the world, whether that meant adding a crane for moving objects or adjusting how vehicles interacted with obstacles. Every iteration refined the balance between control and chaos.
 

Laughing down the road

Humor is at the core of Without a Hitch, and it's baked into every system and session. Like the other cooperative games that came before it, Jordan and Whittaker hope that players take away experiences that the development team never intended. They also hope their quirky lineup of googly eyed cars continues to make a good first impression. 
“People pretty much always giggle the first time they use the proximity chat," Jordan. "Then they see the hoods of the cars moving and it doesn't actually have an engine inside and there's like a little sticky note drawing of an engine inside.”

These playful details, from little engine drawings to players picking each other up, ensure that every session has the chance to be funny and memorable. The team wanted players to discover these moments organically rather than relying on scripted jokes. The result is a game that feels full of spontaneous humor and surprises that emerge from the way players move, interact, and experiment in the environment.
 

A bucket of "friendslop"

A unique part of Without a Hitch is what the studio (and a big portion of the internet) now calls "friendslop." It describes the messy, unpredictable, and often hilarious interactions that happen when multiple players share the same janky, often sloppy-looking digital space. Many of the games mentioned above have been called friendslop in some capacity. 

“I think it's funny," Jordan said. "We definitely embrace friendslop as a term, and it's been interesting talking about it in the studio. We're about 35 people and when we were talking about it originally, there were some folks internally who were like, 'I really hate that term.' I'm like, we need a term to use. It's a term that the internet has chosen, whether we want to use that term or not. It's a term that a lot of people understand and in some ways, resonate with.”

Friendslop represents the philosophy of emergent multiplayer moments. The studio embraced the idea that chaos and improvisation are just as important as skill and strategy. By designing systems that encourage improvisation, Without a Hitch allows players to create their own stories, memorable collisions, and unexpected victories.

Without a Hitch is set to launch sometime in 2026. Codename Entertainment is focused on polishing the multiplayer systems, refining vehicle physics, and nailing the procedural generation systems ahead of launch. The team has hosted two public playtests and many, many more internal ones. They've taken the feedback—and the hilarious situations players have gotten themselves into—as guidance to make the game better.

Wishlist Without a Hitch now on the Epic Games Store.