Skate Story with Sam Eng

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.