Tony Hawk: RIDE - Q&A Feature

Until now, if you had played a Tony Hawk game before, you could pretty much pick any game in the series and be familiar with the controls and gameplay in no time. This is because, since its inception in 1999, the gameplay between sequels has only changed in slight increments. While much loved at first, in recent years this has made the series a little stale. Now, however, Activision and Robomodo have decided to ditch standard controllers in favour of a new board peripheral and take the series in a completely new direction.

We spoke to Patrick Dwyer, Lead Designer at Robomodo, about the board and why the developer and Activision decided to ditch the standard controller.

We've just had a play around on the board, and it's a pretty sensitive, accurate piece of kit. What can you tell us about what's inside it?

There's two accelerometers inside of it and just those two pieces of electronics can get you the tilt, which is the roll and pitch (this is the up and down), and the yaw, which is the rotation. From these you can pull off over a hundred tricks and then it also has the four sensors which work from the board up to about waist height to recognise grabs and when you push off.

When we started out we wanted to make sure we got the basic flip tricks, grinds, grabs and manuals, and then from there we added all the inverts and stalls and so on. So with this tech we got the tricks we wanted to nail to make a solid game, and added as much as we could on top of that.

You say that you developed this game from the ground up with the board in mind and abandoned the use of a standard controller. How did you come to this decision?

When we were starting out we did tonnes of iterations, just trying to get the board to feel right. We got the board to a point where it was consumer friendly and it gave us all the data that we needed to drive all these different gameplay mechanics. This was before the game was made, when we were looking at basic running software so we could see the mechanics in motion and see how they work. We saw the experience of mapping the player one to one: when I lifted up the board slowly my character on screen would do the same and, when I rotated, it rotated with me. The fun of the game at this point was that we had complete control of our avatar and, whatever we were doing, he was doing. So, when I lined up an object, jumped up to it and grinded it, it equated to everything that I did. Then, when we had the controller working with it, we weren't getting the same experience. To try and make an equal experience with the controller we had to severely change what we could do on the software side to support that. We had this board, we had our gameplay experience and we just really wanted to focus on those to nail it.

The board would also be spot-on for a snowboarding game like the Shaun White series. Have you guys had any plans to do anything like that?

As far as any future titles or future software that can go with it, we're not sure. We're just focusing on this one for the moment. The board is extremely versatile with its sensors, and you could do anything with it. The important thing is, if other software is developed for it you would have to take the software and develop it from the ground up like we did. If you try to put this on top of something else, it wouldn't feel the same.

Have you guys got your hands on the Natal hardware yet? How would it compare to what you've done with the board?

Skateboarding is about the person on the skateboard and it's about the board - the feedback of something underneath you, tilting and pitching, is important. When you're doing a manual, for example, you can feel the board lifted up under your feet and that's a huge part of the experience. If you lost that you'd be losing a large part of the gameplay experience. A combination of the two would be interesting though if it could be seamless.

What multiplayer support is there for Tony Hawk?

Any mode that you can play in our single-player experience, you can play in the hotseat version. The game is pretty much built for that. You play through one mode and the next guy comes up and it tracks your times and scores for rankings, so you can all compete against each other.

You can also play any of our levels online in speed and trick sessions where you'll be simultaneously competing on the same course at once.

How has the gameplay evolved alongside this new peripheral?

A lot of it came down to our level design. The game is based in this open world setting and the open world took control away from us to lay out the gameplay experience. We really wanted the gameplay to come to the player, so the pacing of this was important. We've tried to make it so every time you come off of an object you can see a few other options that are easy to get to.

Then we took our game modes and deconstructed them into their basic mechanics. Instead of having to pick up skate letters and combo letters and all these different things in one session, we just took whatever the goal of the experience was and put it in just one session. You don't want to have to figure out what you want to do while skating; you just want to skate. It breaks down to three modes: speed, which is racing through a course, and tricks and challenges, where we tell you what to go for.

We've just been playing a linear style of level for our hands-on time, which is unusual for Tony Hawk. Will there still be sandbox style levels?

We have four types of layouts for levels. We have the A to B style, where it's pretty straight forward - narrow and linear. We have a plaza, like old Tony Hawk levels where everything is more spaced out. Then there's a combination of the two, which is a like a long rectangular course. There are also half-pipe levels where you turn the board sideways to match the experience of going up a half-pipe - that's one thing that none of the other games have. It seemed obvious when we deconstructed the game modes as Tony Hawk is a big vert skater himself.

How does the career mode play out? Has that changed too?

You go from region to region; you start off in southern California and travel across the entire globe. The last level in the game is one of the best levels in the game, but I don't want to give that away yet. The story is mostly about meeting pro skaters and learning about them and getting bigger. Everyone does the zero to hero story, but we've just gone for hero to even bigger hero. You're basically just meeting people and having fun.

Any plans for DLC content?

You might want to talk to Activision about that, it's ready to go but... [ed. We ran out of the alotted time for our Q&A at this point but, for what it's worth, Patrick seemed to be referring to the game and peripheral as "ready to go", rather than specific DLC].

TVG would like to thank Robomodo's Lead Designer, Patrick Dwyer for taking the time to speak with us.