Skater, Die! (working title) -
- This one breaks my heart to think about a bit because it was the project that my old studio, DANG!, went out on. The dream was to make an open-world skateboarding game with badass combat that put skateboarding front and center, and with a killer story to boot. We had the world and story parts worked out pretty solidly, and even came up with a pipeline to allow a team of three artists to populate an entire world with models and textures. But when it came to the combat, I would say I was too married to the movie in my head and couldn't let got of it enough to see that, mechanically, it wasn't working. It just wasn't fluid enough, turns out creating a combat system that works even when the player has a skateboard that always goes at 70 mph in an open-world is really hard. Eventually we reduced combat down to some very basic verbs and decided to emphasize tricks and pure platforming, but by then the games industry had started to enter the doom-spiral that we're still in, and funding options had started to dry up. Our one solid lead for funding pulled out (an Embracer subsidy), and we scrambled for options, pitching a severely reduced version of the game at PAX West 2024. But our pitch landed with a thud, and reducing the budget down to a couple hundred thousand US dollars was still nowhere near enough, we were well outside of the budgets most indie publishers were able to afford. And so it goes that this story ends with a tribute page to the sickest unreleased skateboarding game about exploring the post-apocalypse, fighting mutant tigers and blowing up a shopping mall that a five person team could've hoped to make. Direction, art and animation by myself, graphics, shaders and engine tools by Sam Suite, AI programming by Bones Taylor, writing by Sean Concannon, concepts by Janice Ho.