Software Engineering Daily

Skate Story with Sam Eng

58 min

Indie developer Sam Eng discusses the creation of his critically acclaimed game, Skate Story, a unique vaporwave-infused skateboarding adventure where players control a glass demon tasked with eating the moon. He delves into the game's design philosophy, balancing realistic skateboarding physics with approachable controls, and the five-year journey to implement innovative boss battles and a custom combo system. Eng also shares insights into the game's distinct "high-fidelity retro" visual style and the challenges of building a custom physics engine in Unity.

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✨ Key Takeaways

1

Skate Story features a distinct vaporwave aesthetic and an existential narrative where players control a glass demon skating through the underworld to eat the moon, blending fluid mechanics with exploration and puzzles.
2

Sam Eng initially aimed for a hyper-realistic simulator but simplified controls for a narrative-driven experience, innovating by tying trick difficulty to speed and spending five years developing a unique boss battle system where combos directly damage enemies.
3

Despite using Unity, the game's core skateboard physics are custom-built from scratch, not relying on Unity's native physics, which presented significant implementation challenges and edge cases.
4

The game employs a "modern take on retro visuals," using advanced shaders and post-effects (like a "world space noise" shader for a warbled, dreamlike look) to achieve a polished, modern feel while evoking old skate tapes played on a CRT.
5

Sam is a founding member of Gumbo, a non-profit game developer co-working space/collective in Brooklyn, which started scrappy and grew organically, emphasizing the importance of shared creative environments.

💬 Notable Quotes

"“I really want the words skate in it, because I want people to know it's a skateboarding game. And then I really want people to know that's not a sandbox game. Like it's a linear story game. So it's like oh well I guess it's gonna be called skate story because I want every player to know that it's a linear adventure game.”"
"“When you do a combo so Tony Hawk right you play Tony Hawk where yeah so to compare real life to Tony Hawk in Tony Hawk you do a combo and then when your wheels touch the ground when all four wheels touch the ground your combo is over which makes a lot of sense in a video game because it's like yeah it's over you ended the string of tricks and you're good to go real life that's not how it works like you... Realizing that of like a combo is don't actually end when your wheels touch the ground it actually ends when the skaters says it ends.”"
"“If I could make this game and inspire people to just pick up a skateboard after playing it, that is the metric of success.”"