Interviews// Jay Balmer, Associate Producer, SKATE

SPOnG: So you can play the pros in the game, pulling huge airs as Danny Way or mental street skating tricks as Mark Gonzales and so on?

Jay Balmer: No, we’re actually focussed on the player playing as themselves and then getting to skate with the pros. This is really YOUR story, but you will have the opportunity to skate with the pros who will skate just as they do in real life… so you won’t see PJ Ladd riding the half pipe… and Gonz will take creative lines through different areas… Danny Way is actually designing his in-game location around a place he’s actually planning to build in reality, so you’ll eventually be able to go to this dream park that Danny’s designing for the game in reality!

SPOnG: That’s awesome! Whereabouts is that gonna be?

Jay Balmer: [laughs] I don’t actually know if Danny’s announced that to the world just yet, so I’d better not say!

SPOnG: One of the key elements of the game seems to be the controls and the hyper-realistic board physics… the fact that you are moving away from often-difficult-to-remember button combos a la Tony Hawks…can you say a little bit more about the whole in-game physics model?

Jay Balmer: Yeh, well we really wanted to bring the actual feeling of skateboarding to life, so from the initial design stages we asked ourselves ‘OK what controls do we want to press to recreate the feeling of an ollie?’ ‘What feels right?’ ‘What would I want to do to grab the board?’ ‘What makes sense?’… So, we really developed that organically so it feels right.

Then the physics is what is represented on screen – so by building this great physics model it becomes accurate and it becomes something you can connect yourself to, because that’s what you know from reality you know? Everybody has jumped down a couple of stairs – whether on a skateboard or just on their feet – the in-game physics recreates these feelings… and it also ensures we can’t do anything too crazy! Physics is sort of our map! [laughs]

SPOnG: The look and the general aesthetic of the game is pretty realistic too – fairly gritty almost…was this a deliberate design aim?

Jay Balmer: Again, in terms of the feel of the game – if it looks and moves like reality then it just gets the player more connected. The art direction was basically something we wanted to look good – people are going to be making their own videos taken from the game – so one of the words that kept cropping up was ‘photogenic’…we took loads of inspiration in this regard from real skate videos…what skate video producers have been doing recently, what the quality of the film is like and so on…Plus, the city’s a gritty place right?

SPOnG: So what’s the in-game city called?

Jay Balmer: Sanvanelona!

SPOnG: So that’s taking inspiration from San Fran, Vancouver and Barcelona yeh?

Jay Balmer: Yeh, it’s that and more. It’s taking what we love about those three cities as skaters, what bits were inspirational to us and designing something entirely new based around that.