Interviews// Jay Balmer, Associate Producer, SKATE

SPOnG: You mentioned earlier that there are certain areas in Sanvanelona that you maybe shouldn’t strictly be skating…just like in real life! What are these? Pools and stuff?

Jay Balmer: Yeh, well basically if you are a skater then you’ll know there are always places that security doesn’t want you to skate! [laughs] So there’s that conflict with security and so on in the game… And then there’s places where you have to earn your way in.

You hear rumours about somebody’s backyard pool … but you can’t just skate up to the house and go skate the pool! You are going to have to earn your way in or know somebody or have them get to know you before you get to skate those areas… So it’s not like ‘jump through the hoops and do this’ and we’ll let you skate…it’s more ‘prove to us who you are and we’ll let you in’…so people need to know who you are before they let you in.

SPOnG: So that touches on the whole aspect of progression in the game. It looks like a very open-world type game with this massive city [Sanvanelona] to skate, so, with that in mind, what drives the player forward? What incentives are there to progress?

Jay Balmer: Well, as mentioned it’s new places to skate, that’s what drives and intrigues me as a skateboarder. It’s driven my progression through many of the Tony Hawk games – once I actually get all the places in the game open, there’s not so much drive to keep playing… so new places to skate is one of them. There’s many other things that are involved in the overall progression from moving from being an unknown skater to being a pro skater – being sponsored, being recognised…You know there’s nothing ‘real’ – we’re not offering real money or anything as cash prizes! [laughs]

So, everything is inside the game, nothing may motivate you, we see a lot of people when they are playing the game not doing any of the challenges – even though they are there – just having fun skating… So, that’s many peoples experience of skateboarding – they may not be motivated to do anything but make videos and skate the same spot maybe… and that’s cool.

SPOnG: Technically, there’s some interesting new stuff in the game – the slo-motion audio in particular really stands out – how did you do this?

Jay Balmer: Well, it really helps using physics… so physics gives us so much information, it tells us when each wheel lands – so we can play a sound when each wheel lands and connect that sound to a true physics-modelled event…so likewise, when your foot hits the board we know you should hear something…so physics just gives us all that information… the wheels are actually spinning, they are physical objects, and so we can hear them spinning…so by connecting all the sounds to these true physics events, when you start to play them in slow motion they happen at the right time…hearing the board land is one thing, but hearing it in slow motion - wow!

The audio team really had to work hard at getting this right and they’ve done an amazing job. Again, it’s all physics. Physics gives us the info we can use to drive these types of events.