Session<\/em><\/a>, an popular indie skateboarding game that hit Early Access in September – the actual art of skating is a far cry from the perfect lines and endless combos of the most famous franchise of its type in games.<\/p>\n\u201cI had been skating for a while, since I was eight or nine years old, even before the first <\/span>Tony Hawk <\/em>game came out, so it\u2019s not like it made me into a skater or anything,\u201d Houde says. \u201cIt combined two things I was passionate about, so I liked that, but I never really saw it as a skating game. It was a combo game, a really fun combo game…It helped boost the culture of skating, and it made it more popular, but as far as simulating what it\u2019s actually like to be on a board, it wasn\u2019t really going for that.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gamasutra.com\/ckfinder\/userfiles\/27524733\/session2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Prior to <\/span>Session<\/em>, Houde worked as an animator and motion capture expert on a wide variety of notable mega-games, including the Assassin\u2019s Creed<\/em> and Batman: Arkham<\/em> series. While he enjoyed his experience at studios that churn out blockbuster after blockbuster, in his spare time, he kept cranking away at different design documents for what he deemed a more \u201csimulation-like\u201d skateboarding game, inspired by the cult classic Thrasher: Skate and Destroy<\/em>, a more realistic take on the sport that never quite captured the same audience as the easily-accessible THPS<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\nBut it was only after Houde played <\/span>Skate<\/em> – arguably the only successful attempt by a major publisher to resurrect the extreme sports genre in the post-Tony Hawk<\/em> era – that he realized there was a legitimate market for a skating game that actually felt like the real thing. \u201cThe idea of using the thumbsticks for tricks was something I had never considered,\u201d he says. \u201cTo me, it was a revolution, and it made me want to get back into it.\u201d<\/p>\nAfter <\/span>Skate<\/em> managed to outsell a middling entry in the waning THPS<\/em> series in 2007, Houde decided to enlist some of his coworkers in making a 2.5D Skate<\/em>-like prototype in their off-hours. But, as crunch began to mount, and they all started pulling 80-hour weeks at their day jobs, the project fizzled to nothing. It was only after Houde co-founded his own company, Crea-ture Studios, in 2013, that he was able to fully commit his time to making his dream project.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s just a tough part of working in the triple-A industry,\u201d he says. \u201cEven when you\u2019re between big projects, you get busy really quickly, and you don\u2019t have any time to work on your own thing. That\u2019s why it\u2019s only able to happen now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWhen Crea-ture started working on the game that would become <\/span>Session<\/em>, Houde was determined to start from scratch, rather than simply building on the model that Skate<\/em> had established a decade earlier. As part of that process, they quickly landed on perhaps the game\u2019s most controversial design decision: by default, you use the triggers to steer your skater, rather that the traditional left-thumbstick, which is instead used for the famous feats of foot-acrobatics. Though Houde admits that some of his fellow developers at the studio found the control scheme anything-but-straightforward, over time, he managed to convert them to the cause.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cI think a lot of the time, we have a tendency to mistake a habit for intuitiveness,\u201d he says. \u201cBasically, you think a thing is intuitive, but it\u2019s actually just because you\u2019ve done it that way for so long.<\/span><\/p>\n“When it comes to a \u2018realistic\u2019 skateboarding game, in real life, when you turn a skateboard, you put more weight on the direction you want to go, on your toes or your heel, depending on your style. So, newcomers find it a lot more intuitive, but most of us, when it comes to that quick motion, our thumbs still go to that left thumbstick. You have to do it for several hours to really get used to it, but once you do, I think it works really well.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gamasutra.com\/ckfinder\/userfiles\/27524733\/session3.jpg\")
<\/span><\/p>\nHoude recognizes that in today\u2019s crowded game market, it\u2019s a significant risk to test a player\u2019s patience with a difficult-to-grasp control setup right out of the gate. But, to him, that cycle of trial-and-error is true to the real-life sport that <\/span>Session<\/em> purports to represent, and is thus a key part of its appeal.<\/p>\nBy the default control scheme, when your character starts skating with the opposite foot forward, the entire stick setup flips, which disorients even veteran players. He himself views the project as a \u201cstatement\u201d that hearkens back to previous eras of gaming, where players would spend hours mastering a game\u2019s core mechanics at their own pace. That\u2019s also why <\/span>Session<\/em> doesn\u2019t include the standard THPS<\/em>-esque litany of missions to complete and tapes to collect. Houde\u2019s stated approach is simple: set your own goals, and make your own fun.\u00a0<\/p>\nWhile he admits there are some definite limitations to this approach, for now, he\u2019s happy with <\/span>Session\u2019<\/em>s reception so far. (He also notes the game\u2019s extensive roadmap, which includes better physics, a more fleshed-out city, and an intricate editing mode that simulates the skate videos of the sport\u2019s golden age.) He says the studio owes that to Session\u2019s hardcore bona-fides, not to mention the roiling hunger among that community for new skateboarding games, which shows no signs of abating any time soon.<\/p>\n\u201cWe really wanted to capture the experience of what it\u2019s like to actually start skating, where you have to learn the tricks that you want to learn, and do it all by your own power,\u201d he says. \u201cI have friends who played the game for hours and hours, mastered a lot of it, then took a week or two off, and they told me they had to relearn a bunch of the more complex tricks. That\u2019s exactly what we\u2019re going for.<\/span><\/p>\n“If you don\u2019t practice, you suffer…When I was trying to explain why I wanted to make a simulation skateboard game to my coworkers, they would always say, \u2018real life is boring. Why make a game about that?\u2019 Well, to me, real life isn\u2019t boring, it\u2019s very hard, but interesting. That\u2019s what I want the people who play <\/span>Session<\/em> to appreciate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n[ad_2]
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[ad_1] The first time I ever saw someone pull off a kickflip in real life, I was utterly amazed. Though it was well-after the Tony Hawk\u2019s Pro Skater series had blazed a path for so-called \u201cextreme sports\u201d in pop culture – and I had pulled off many hundred of my own all around School II […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"blocksy_meta":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/e928cfdc7rs.exactdn.com\/info\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2019\/11\/Why-Sessions-skateboarding-design-is-more-Skate-than-Tony-Hawk.jpg?strip=all","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2TFCd-8F","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielparente.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}