There’s an irony that games about skateboarding, a sporting activity you’d associate with gritty underground counterculture, are largely in the domain of the corporate mainstream. Its biggest name, Tony Hawk, has been milked with one slick remake after another by Activision, while the long-awaited return of Skate arrives as a messy open-world live service experience as EA tries to spin it as its own Fortnite. Thank goodness, then, for Skate Story coming to offer something a little weirder.
Described by solo indie developer Sam Eng as “a vaporwave skateboarding game”, it’s quite different from a typical sports game, from its psychedelic art style to also having a strange narrative at its heart.
“At its core, it’s just an adventure game, where the main form of interaction is just moving around and interacting with the environment and characters,” he tells me. “It just happens that it is a skateboarding game, where you can perform tricks.”
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(Image credit: Sam Eng / snowhydra, LLC)
Skate or die
To give you a quick summary, Skate Story is set in the Underworld, where you play as a demon who makes a deal with the Devil for their freedom, if they can skate to the Moon and swallow it, all while having also been transformed into glass.
As offbeat as that may sound, the inspirations are closer to reality for Eng. “At its core, I am inspired by New York City, where I’m from,” he explains. “There are many depictions of the city, but because Skate Story takes place in the Underworld, I wanted to focus on a city vibe of nighttime.”
In particular, one of Eng’s activities would involve skating at nighttime while listening to synthwave music, which in turn informed the visual and sonic aesthetics of the game. “I was a big fan of Blood Cultures [who, along with John Fio, are behind Skate Story’s original soundtrack], and once we started collaborating, I would really skate around listening to their work and think of the real-life textures and lights that mattered to me.”
(Image credit: Sam Eng / snowhydra, LLC)
It also seems deliberately contradictory that your character is made of crystal glass, given you’re almost certainly going to collide with the environment and shatter into a thousand pieces. Eng says the glass was actually inspired by glass beads, being one of the components that’s usually embedded in the grip tape of a skateboard.
“I was also obsessed with the elements of the board,” he adds. “The idea was more the feeling when skateboarding. I wanted this game to reflect the way I see skateboarding, as an amateur and non-pro skateboarder.”
(Image credit: Sam Eng / snowhydra, LLC)
Camera tricks
Another unusual visual choice is the camera perspective, which, rather than being placed directly behind your character, is more to the side, which looks cinematic at the expense of clearly seeing what’s ahead of you. Eng, however, thinks of this from a skating rather than gameplay perspective.
“Having the camera directly behind the skateboard, like a car, is not how skate videos are shot; you don’t have a good look at the trick or the texture of the board on the environment,” he explains, though also noting players can adjust settings, such as increasing the camera’s distance behind them. “It was an extremely difficult balance between showing the board, seeing the skater’s body, and being able to see in front of you.”
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Considering the 3D assets were made with an “ancient” 2.79 version of Blender, which originally came out in 2017, that may give an indication of how long Skate Story has been in development for. (Read our Blender tutorials.) Originally announced in 2022, its planned 2023 release then slipped to 2024, and then finally to 2025. The challenges of solo development surely have something to do with that, too, though, to cut some slack, the recently announced Nintendo Switch 2 version is at least being handled by an external porting house.
(Image credit: Sam Eng / snowhydra, LLC)
The pros of being indie
“I’ve decided that I want to continue making games mostly solo, so I try to lean on the advantages of being an independent solo creator,” says Eng. “There are many advantages, such as being able to make fast decisions and prototyping without lengthy meetings or having to convince multiple parties. I can also rely on the integration between systems in the game, such as between narrative, tech, textures, and shaders. So I try to rely on the fact that I am doing so much, to leverage that interconnection as best I can.”
He admits to challenges, too, from burnout to technical ability (and limitations). However, he also came up with a quick way of developing the game with Unity by creating many in-editor tools. (Read our best game development software guide.)
“I created a statically typed, dynamically extensible event action trigger system that allows for quick prototyping of all game functions, without code,” he explains. “It’s quicker than even using visual scripting, and less fragile, because of its sturdy typing, and all references are serialized and then interpreted at runtime. It also allows for fast iteration for content scenes by reducing domain reloads in the engine.
(Image credit: Sam Eng / snowhydra, LLC)
Eng hopes Skate Story will appeal to a cross-section of players, not just those who dig skateboarding games but also those with just a passing interest. “I think of the game as more of an adventure game. I have gotten some pleasant comments from people saying they have no interest in ‘skateboarding’ but like the look of the game – that really is cool!”
Skate Story release for PC, PS5 and Switch 2 on 8 December. Check out the demo on Steam.
