Skatebird’s cute skateboarding birds, like all of us, are doing their best

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Some games are inspired by the personal and deep experiences of the developer. Others are triggered by real world events or love by other means.

For Skatebird developer Megan Fox, it all started with a gif of a bird on a skateboard.

Fox is a seasoned developer who worked at AAA on the LEGO Universe before going independent and releasing games like Jones on Fire, Hot Tin Roof, and Spartan Fist. He started working at Skatebird in 2018 after, he says, Spartan Fist “bombed” and had to let his entire development team go. Whatever she did next, Fox was sure at the time that she would have to do it mostly alone.

But that certainty didn’t last long. First, a fellow game developer calling himself KevKev offered a physics-based skateboard prototype codebase to anyone who wanted it, after discovering that putting humans on skateboards was “inconsistent and weird.” Fox began to play with it, letting the inspiration from the gif he had seen lead the way, and he quickly discovered that it was much easier to put a bird on a skateboard than a human.

“You know what a human is supposed to look like on a skateboard,” says Fox. “Professionals are supposed to look great. There’s a particular look and feel, etc. If you put a bird on a skateboard, well, nobody knows. really how he’s supposed to stand on the skateboard. They look awkward, well, they’re a bird on a skateboard. “

Skatebirds of a feather

Fox wasn’t the only one who thought birds on skateboards looked funny. At E3 2019, Fox found a space for Skatebird at the Kinda Funny Games Showcase and launched their Kickstarter simultaneously. The support was tremendous, enough that Fox expanded the scope of the game from a fun little skating prank to include objectives, a story, and many more birds than originally planned. Although he planned this next project to be solo fun, Fox began working with other people again to support the development of Skatebird. What started as a kind of “whatever” joke had turned into a serious and thorough project.

“I think people think it’s a lot bigger than it is,” Fox says. “It takes five to eight hours to get over it. It’s not huge. But I guess that’s the size of most skating games. So maybe it is. “

While the idea for Skatebird started out silly, its expanded scope meant Fox quickly had to become an expert at two things she didn’t know much about: birds and skateboarding. The former happened organically once he moved to the Seattle area and started feeding the birds as a hobby, gradually learning the names and how to identify different species.

If they flap a lot and look awkward, well, they’re a bird on a skateboard.

“

He also hired a skateboarding expert to teach him the different tricks and techniques, as he wanted Skatebird to genuinely reflect the sport rather than include a bunch of made-up tricks. Having briefly skated in the past “in combat boots and a trench coat,” Fox chose not to return to the board during development to avoid getting hurt, but he intends to pick up the hobby now that the game is released.

Along with the research, Fox wanted their skateboarding game to be accessible in a way that big-name skating titles had understood, but ultimately failed to achieve. To do this, he looked at the very clear button assignments from Tony Hawk’s games (meaning they could easily be rearranged or assigned to a different controller if necessary) and tried to combine them with the removal of EA’s Skate franchise from the skins. more accurate arcade.

“You can collapse almost all buttons into one button, you can make a single button do the grind and flip trick,” she says. “And it’s not ideal, like you can’t do all the tricks in the game this way. But you can totally play the game this way.”

The finished Skatebird is cute and whimsical and full, as Fox wished, birds that “do their best”. It is linked by the story of a bird whose “Big Friend” (a human, of course) has stopped skateboarding, prompting the bird to try to inspire them to pick it up again while skating in small fields the size of a bird. There are objectives to discover and a lot of customization for the bird hero. Although it is primarily a skateboarding game, there is no denying Skatebird’s meme ability, true to the gifs that inspired it.

Skatebird comes at a time when skateboarding games are undergoing a little renaissance, from commercials for indie titles like Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and ridiculous riffs like Street Uni X (think Tony Hawk but a unicycle), to AAA endeavors like the revival of EA from the Skate franchise. and of course the return of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2.

Whether or not the genre sticks around forever or skates into the sunset, Fox says that now accidentally turned out to be a good time to launch a skateboarding video game.

“There are tons and tons of indies that are starting to play in this genre,” says Fox. “And usually that’s the sign that the genre has blossomed and is really starting. And then when EA Skate comes out, that’s the sign that AAA is entering the space again, because the indies have proven once again that this genre exists and works and makes money and AAA says, ‘I like money.’ And then they come in and after that, no I know what will happen. They could kill the genre again, or maybe not. But at least now it’s pretty good. “

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @Patovalentino.



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