Skate Story with Sam Eng
Episode
57 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Design & UX, Software Development, Crypto & Web3
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Custom Physics Over Engine Defaults: Skate Story's skateboard movement is built entirely from scratch rather than using Unity's PhysX system. The player has no physical body in the engine — instead, Sam casts against Unity colliders and moves the character through custom code. This approach gives precise control but introduces edge cases like broken wall-riding that standard physics engines handle automatically.
- ✓Speed-Dependent Trick Difficulty: Replicating real skateboarding physics means trick execution becomes harder as speed increases. Sam implemented this by tying the timing window indicator's speed directly to player velocity, borrowing the Gears of War active reload mechanic. Designers building skill-based games should consider making core mechanics scale in difficulty with player state rather than keeping them constant.
- ✓Combo Termination via Stomp System: Rather than ending combos when all four wheels touch ground (the Tony Hawk model), Sam observed that real skaters mentally define where a combo ends — the final trick. He built a "stomp" mechanic where pressing square mid-air explicitly terminates the combo, releasing accrued momentum as boss damage, solving five years of arena boss design problems in one system.
- ✓World-Space Warble Shader for Dreamlike Visuals: To achieve a high-fidelity retro aesthetic without lowering resolution, Sam built a post-effect shader that reprojects world-space position onto a tiled 3D texture, then uses that texture to offset screen-space UVs. The effect is pinned in world space so geometry warbles consistently based on camera position, with warbling reduced at screen center for gameplay readability.
- ✓Camera Parameters Simulate Skate Video Cinematography: The player camera tracks velocity, direction, slope, and trick state across multiple spring-arm parameters to emulate a handheld skate videographer. Wind microphone noise volume and pitch are tied to camera movement speed rather than player speed. Giving players full manual camera control — uncommon in fast-movement games — required a third full rebuild of the system.
What It Covers
Indie developer Sam Ng discusses building Skate Story, a vaporwave skateboarding game released in 2025, covering five years of development decisions including custom Unity physics, procedural camera systems, trick mechanics tied to real skateboarding principles, boss battle design iteration, and the Gumbo NYC game developer co-working collective.
Key Questions Answered
- •Custom Physics Over Engine Defaults: Skate Story's skateboard movement is built entirely from scratch rather than using Unity's PhysX system. The player has no physical body in the engine — instead, Sam casts against Unity colliders and moves the character through custom code. This approach gives precise control but introduces edge cases like broken wall-riding that standard physics engines handle automatically.
- •Speed-Dependent Trick Difficulty: Replicating real skateboarding physics means trick execution becomes harder as speed increases. Sam implemented this by tying the timing window indicator's speed directly to player velocity, borrowing the Gears of War active reload mechanic. Designers building skill-based games should consider making core mechanics scale in difficulty with player state rather than keeping them constant.
- •Combo Termination via Stomp System: Rather than ending combos when all four wheels touch ground (the Tony Hawk model), Sam observed that real skaters mentally define where a combo ends — the final trick. He built a "stomp" mechanic where pressing square mid-air explicitly terminates the combo, releasing accrued momentum as boss damage, solving five years of arena boss design problems in one system.
- •World-Space Warble Shader for Dreamlike Visuals: To achieve a high-fidelity retro aesthetic without lowering resolution, Sam built a post-effect shader that reprojects world-space position onto a tiled 3D texture, then uses that texture to offset screen-space UVs. The effect is pinned in world space so geometry warbles consistently based on camera position, with warbling reduced at screen center for gameplay readability.
- •Camera Parameters Simulate Skate Video Cinematography: The player camera tracks velocity, direction, slope, and trick state across multiple spring-arm parameters to emulate a handheld skate videographer. Wind microphone noise volume and pitch are tied to camera movement speed rather than player speed. Giving players full manual camera control — uncommon in fast-movement games — required a third full rebuild of the system.
Notable Moment
Sam described the moment he physically fell while skating slowly and noticed his actual vision rolling across the ground rather than watching a ragdoll from outside. This became the game's wipeout camera system — shifting from third-person to a first-person rolling perspective that mirrors the real physical sensation of falling.
Episode Transcript
Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression. But skate story takes the genre in a radically different direction. It has a distinct vaporwave vibe and blends fluid skate mechanics with exploration, puzzles, and an existential narrative about freedom, pain, and obsession. The game was created by indie developer Sam Ng, who previously released Tsar Vaught for the Nintendo Switch. Skate Story launched to critical acclaim and was widely regarded as one of the best games of 2025. In this episode, Sam joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing Skate Story. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod. End game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Sam, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Hey. What's up? Thanks for having me on. So to kick us off, let's talk about your journey into game development. How did you become an indie game developer, and what led you to Skate Story today? Yeah. I mean, I think for me, game development was, like, I didn't know it was a real thing that people could do. Because you play games as a kid, and you're like, oh, I like games, and they just kinda appear from the ether. So I didn't think that it was, like, a real, you know, job. But then I saw these people making games online. I remember reading, like, Rock Paper Shotgun, and they would have this weekly roundup of, like, free games. And then these were just, like, indie developers. So I would play some of them, and then there's this one developer named Incapare or goes by Incapare that just would make all these games and put them on the website. And I remember seeing, like, some of the source code for some of their games. So I would just kinda download them and, like, tinker with them. And I saw that they were using this, like back in the day, they were trying all these, like, different softwares, and I saw one that was, like, called Unity. So I downloaded it, like Unity two or something, Unity three. And I was like, oh, this is kinda cool. Like, I could probably make, like, a little silly thing. That's how I kinda got started. That's awesome. So you got started in the context of free games. Obviously, we mentioned there the intro some of your commercial ventures. Did you kick about any free games before you got into, I guess, the doing it for money part? Yeah. I made some, like, really, really stupid games for my friends. Just like kinda like meme games. Yeah. So maybe, like, 2011 or something just for, like, school friends. I made, like, this one game that was sort …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
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Tools
by Unity Technologies
“Skate Story's skateboard movement is built entirely from scratch rather than using Unity's PhysX system. The player has no physical body in the engine — instead, Sam casts against Unity colliders”
Products
- Skate StoryBy guest
“Indie developer Sam Ng discusses building Skate Story, a vaporwave skateboarding game released in 2025, covering five years of development decisions”
“Sam implemented this by tying the timing window indicator's speed directly to player velocity, borrowing the Gears of War active reload mechanic.”
company
“covering five years of development decisions including custom Unity physics, procedural camera systems, trick mechanics tied to real skateboarding principles, boss battle design iteration, and the Gumbo NYC game developer co-working collective.”
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