Gaming
You can’t talk about skateboarding games without EA’s legendary Skate franchise popping up. The long dormant franchise hasn’t seen a release in eight years, but its intuitive control scheme and distinctive lo-fi, wide angle lens camera look cast a long, long shadow over the action sports genre – one it can still be hard to escape from, especially when you’re an indie developer trying to carve your own way with your own game.
That’s not stopping the team of two at creā-ture Studio from trying though. Session looks to be a new challenger in the skate game arena, though with its focus on verisimilitude, it’s not just another contender, but a potentially new trailblazer in a stale genre.
We're not trying to do Skate 4.
“Skate was a huge inspiration for us, but we kind of decided to go for something even more realistic,” Marc-André Houde, creative and artistic director and co-founder of creā-ture Studios tells RedBull.com “We're not trying to do Skate 4. Obviously, it'd be crazy to think we could do Skate 4, but we’re just trying to make the best game we can. Some people expect Skate 4, and we're not hiding that we're really inspired by the franchise, but people automatically expect that we're going to be Skate 4, that it will ship with the same amount of features, and will just be overall better.
“We hope to bring a lot of fresh air with the game, especially with the controls. I think we're covering a lot of stuff that the Skate franchise was not covering at the time; it's going to be a new way of skateboarding games.”
He’s not wrong. Session up-ends the control scheme, for starters. Skate introduced “flick it” analogue stick controls to bust out tricks, but Session aims to go a step further to make it even more realistic: each analogue stick controls a foot. There’s more too, as you’ll find realistic ground navigation, true skate physics via the trucks and all four wheels, plus ragdoll animation effects for those truly gnarly bails. Skate game fans were teased with a short trailer in June 2015, showcasing a very small teaser of the game – and within weeks, it garnered well over 100,000 views with fans clamouring for more on social media and Reddit.
It wasn’t until that first teaser trailer dropped that that Houde and his creā-ture co-founder, Vincent Da Silva, realised they were really onto something with Session – even if skate games were the pair’s burning passion.
“The journey of the project has been pretty special,” Houde tells us. “For the first year and a half, it was kind of difficult. Surprisingly, when we first put out this teaser video, we were not expecting at all the reception we got, and actually, at that time, it was just a part-time project. The idea behind the original video was to get a really small amount of people to see if there was any interest. We were expecting, two or three hundred views, something like that, just from friends sharing it – and definitely not the 200,000 or so.”
But interest doesn’t equal funds, as any game developer will tell you. Soon after, the pair had to pause Session’s session.
“We kept working on the game and shared a lot with the community just to make sure we were going in the right direction. We decided to take a break because it was too difficult to make the game, survive full time, pay the bills, and so on, so we put the project on hold until we had some funds.”
Now though, they’re back – and emboldened to take that original concept and start over, with an even more ambitious game. “We started to work on some funds around a year ago, and we managed to get a chunk for a prototype, the first early version. Starting from March, we decided to quit our jobs, go full time on the project and then ditch everything from before – and restart from zero, and build this whole crazy idea that it is today.”
That restart from zero sounds exactly as drastic as you might imagine: the Montreal-based team originally started the game in the Unity engine, but to keep their vision true, they had to completely scrap the work done in that engine and start from scratch.
“We thought it was going well, and we were comfortable with the engine, but on the graphical side, it was too hard to reach the artistic vision we wanted to, and to keep a good frame rate and performance, so... we changed the engine,” Houde says. “When we changed the engine over to Unreal Engine 4, we had to ditch pretty much everything – there was no real effective way to transfer stuff, so we just decided, since we were going full time, we wanted to start on a clean slate, and just scrap everything, and do everything right as much as we can from the beginning based on what we've learned.
“We had a year and a half working on the project on and off, nothing from that really translated to the project now 1-to-1, but we've learned a lot of stuff. We had a chance to validate that the controls were good, a chance to have something decent enough to show it off to a few friends, just to see if the concept was working, if the controls made sense. So we had to validate that as soon as we could.”
While the game’s only been truly worked on for a few years, Houde tells us that he’s had the idea brewing in his head for a long time – way before Skate actually first came out back in 2007.
“It’s something that I've been thinking about for a really, really long time. Skate was barely coming out, so as soon as I saw what Skate was, I was kind of a little down that someone was bringing out a concept that was quite similar to mine. And I didn’t think I'd be able to do anything better at the time. So, the concept kind of went on the shelf for a really long time, and then over time, we started to bring it back and see if it was a good thing.
“So that's why we did this teaser in 2015; it was to make sure that we're not wasting time; that it's a good thing and people are interested in such a project, so, I think it's more a passion thing than a business opportunity for us,” says Houde, who has been skating since he was eight years old.
Of course, timing also helps. “I think the fact that there's no big skate games is also a good thing,” he adds.
That teaser, while not bringing in millions of views, has had a lot of attention from the skateboarding community – even The Berrics, one of the world’s most prominent skateboarding sites, were salivating at the prospect of the game – but there have been some detractors too.
“There was a push of people who were a bit scared in that the game was getting big and that they were worried it couldn't fill these big shoes, so some people gave up on the project due to the pressure; like we couldn't deliver the expectations, and that's definitely something we've tried to share. We've also had this kind of weird backlash in that people are so excited they want to be mad at us; they're like ‘No! It can't be real, it's too good! You guys are liars, it's BS!’. It was really strange. In the end though, for the both of us, it’s kept us on track, and that we definitely have something and that people really want a skateboarding game.”
While Session looks visually similar to Skate – the classic skateboarding video inspired camera angles, for example – it’s nothing like EA’s massive dormant franchise in other ways: creā-ture Studios are looking to take skateboarding video game controls to the next level – and not by introducing a ridiculous physical skateboard peripheral, before you ask.
“When we say we're inspired by Skate, it's that the two main things are that we really want to get closer to a simulation game, so we want the game to feel realistic, and we also feel the controls are an extension to what Skate was in a sense. We’ve got turning with the triggers, and we explored the flick it concept, although we've gone the route in that the left stick is your left foot and the right stick is your right foot, and from there, you just try to mimic the motion of what you would do with your feet when you skateboard,” Houde explains.
“So if you want to do an ollie, you would press down with the right foot to crank, and then you'd press up with the left foot to transfer the weight and then do the ollie. From there, you can then expand: let's say you want to do a kickflip, instead of pushing up with your left foot, you'd push left, and that would give you a kickflip; pushing right would give you a heelflip, and so on. We're really trying to make this more concrete and mimic what you'd do in real life, so this is how we think we're expanding from the Skate games.”
“On the other side, we also have this vision that you're opening the Forza Motorsport options, and you can take out traction control, ABS, and all of those things that hardcore drivers would like to take out, anything that is automated; so we like to see Session a bit like this. We can have this super hardcore version that our main game is like, and after this you can customise your experience, such as say, catching the board is really complex for you when you just want to do a flip, and catching the board is automatic – that would be an option you could tick. It's about finding the right balance.”
While the game’s still in an early stage, it doesn’t mean that it’s in a completely unplayable state – in fact, the team showed off a demo to a group of gamers in a bar to simply get their feedback.
“Just recently we had this small thing, where we asked the community who live in nearby Montreal to show up in a bar and just play the game. We pulled a few stations up. We were asking tons of questions, like ‘how do you feel about the triggers, is the game complex, are the controls weird, is it fun?’”
“The vast majority were super excited about the project; I can say I really surprised by how excited people were for the game. They really liked the complexity of the game too. Since it's left foot and right foot, not front foot and back foot, everything gets really complex if you try to ride switch, or nollie or fakie. This is exactly what we wanted to put in the game to really throw the game and have this feeling of achievement in the game when you're doing something more complex.”
Those that have been paying attention to creā-ture Studios’ comms may have their hopes up that Session will be releasing in some form this year, but Houde and Da Silva tell us that it won’t be the case. “Let's be blunt,” Houde says. “No, we won't ship this year, that's for sure. We would have liked to, if everything happened perfectly – which is never the case – maybe that could have been a thing. But at the same time we have this opportunity of getting things right, and there's no publisher or anyone behind us telling us that we can't add this hardcore feature because it's not going to sell as well as if you did this super easy thing; so we're taking this opportunity to make the game as right as we can, and then we'll ship it.”
Houde tells us that there’s something to look forward to though: the studio is planning on releasing a Kickstarter campaign for the game on 14 November, and while the trend of crowdfunding development has died down in recent years, there’s a passionate community behind Session that could make it happen.
“So right now, we're currently working on a Kickstarter campaign to help us kick start the game, and get us to [Steam] Early Access, which is what we'd like to get to. We're talking about launching a Kickstarter campaign really soon,” he says.
While Houde is aiming to release Session on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, he pauses when we ask about a potential Nintendo Switch version. “We didn’t particularly talk about the Switch internally, but the Switch is not excluded at all,” he tells us. Taking this kind of skateboarding game on the road sounds pretty epic, but as you can imagine, it’s little more than a pipe dream at present.
“There's a lot of things going on right now though; we've built up a lot of traction at the moment which is really exciting and kind of overwhelming at the same time. I feel like every time we pull a little something, the fire lights again – it's really fun that people are excited about the project. It puts pressure, but that motivates us to really create something cool.”
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