Unreal Surfers

The game I envisioned in my head was completely dependent on getting the movement of the surfer feeling fun and accurate. There are a lot of surfing, snowboarding, and skateboarding games, so there's not really a point in rehashing that. Almost all of the surfing games made were basically simulation games where you road up and down the face of a wave scoring points by doing tricks. I love Kelly Slater Pro Surfer, I thought it was a blast, but I'm a surf enthusiast. I don't really see a surfing game out there that's fun for a general audience, or one that has gameplay that is fun unless you like surfing. What I felt was missing from the marketplace was a game that showcased surfing movements and was fun.

Getting the physics and the feel of the motions would be the most difficult thing, and once we got that nailed down, designing the track would be the next thing to focus on.

The idea was to create a simple figure 8 track so that the engineers could get they physics and mechanics feeling how we wanted.

For some reason, the simple figure 8 track didn't happen, and we started testing the mechanics first using race track pieces found in unreal, and just a flat plane. This was fine, but in hindsight we probably should have started with a figure 8 track. I designed a more complicated track, thinking another team member was creating the figure 8 track. This was the first track I designed. I'm not a modeler, so forgive the clunkiness.

We threw it in unreal and there were a ton of issues with scale, track width, and collision. It was clear we needed to iterate faster and more simply to make the progress we wanted to make.