Skate Board
Release type: Incomplete
Release date: 1999
Levels: 3
Author: John Brandon
Related games: Raven, Terra, Skatenig
Not to be mistaken for John Brandon's Skatenig.
A common thread in John and Robert Brandons' work is an emphasis on moment-to-moment experience in favor of well-defined goals. Another common thread is John Brandon's love of extreme sports, which informs over a third the brothers' games together. In principle these interests dovetail beautifully, with the experience of extreme sports being its own reward.
To contrast, Game-Maker is built for avatar-based, goal-oriented game design. You explore, you check things off a list, you move forward. For all of its strengths, Game-Maker's biggest weakness is in its capacity for nuance. For characters, every action is a discrete on-off toggle. If you want to jump to the right, you assign a key to "jump right"; there's no gray logic to allow you to walk to the right, and press a jump key, and allow the circumstance to determine what sort of a jump you'll make.
So, Game-Maker does not quite map to the Brandons' tendencies, and their intentions tend not quite to map to Game-Maker's strengths. What we see over the three games in the "SkateGhoul trilogy" (Skate Board, Raven, and Terra) is a slow shift in priority, from one end of the scale to the other. First you clash with the system, then you try to work against it, then you work your magic within it.
Though it's meant as an extreme sports game, at a glance you could call Skate Board a pretty straighforward, if baffling, platformer. There are no threats, and at least one level keeps going on and on until you find the exit. The real purpose of the game isn't to get to the end, but to do that next leap with style. You keep going to the right, mostly, and you do your tricks. There's no clear reason to do the tricks; you don't get any reward. For one, it would be difficult to systemically reward the player. For another, this isn't about tangible rewards. It's not about goals. It's about the experience!
Of course, Game-Maker rather dampens the experience. There's no skill to the tricks you might do, because there can't be, so there's not much satisfaction from doing them. The various slides and ollies and what-have-you just become extra keys, duplicating your normal movement. Curiously, the game doesn't make use of momentum, so the skateboard only moves as long as you hold the arrow key. Maybe a little multi-tasking would add to a sense of accomplishment. Maybe multiple keys could be tied to partial moves, so the player could somehow string the pieces together to build a performance.
Maybe, maybe not. The point is that Game-Maker isn't really suited to the game intended here -- but the game that resulted is still a rather neat, genial thing. What we end up with is a gentle and atmospheric little exploration platformer, with a sort of interesting architectural twist in level two. In some ways, Skate Board modestly presages the games that would follow in the wake of cly5m's Seiklus, like Knytt.
If the design had stopped here, that analogy might seem like a stretch. But there's more to come from this series...
| Previous | Current | Next |
|---|---|---|
| (Overview) | Skate Board | Raven |
| SkateGhoul series | ||
Contents
Story[edit]
If you actually want to know the story, it goes like this.
One day skateboarder guy was going for a walk when he happened upon a skateboard lying on the road. He picked it up and had an instant urge to go skateboarding. After a while he thought he noticed something different about this skateboard than from others. It was magical. But as he soon found out it only worked its powers during the night. He found out these powers that the skateboard could do, it made him Ollie really high almost by just tapping his foot on the tail and he didn't need to push start to keep moving. He decided after this to go skateboarding all over town, so he started off...
Instructions[edit]
If you actually got this game to work, here are some instructions.
1. Controls:
Controls are as follows:
The numeric keypad is a big help in this game,
- by pressing diagonal right you do an olley towards the right and vice versa.
- By pressing the right key you move right and vice versa.
- By pressing up you do a very low to the ground olley. (The low olley is never really needed)
Some tricks are:
- insert = board slide
- Enter = 5 0 Grind (Hint. Do on rails)
- + = spin
- * = kickflip
- - = nosebone
(Other tricks will be added after being suggested)
Please tell me about comments our questions on this program. Give me ideas for levels.
Credits[edit]
Designed by
- John and Robert Brandon
Engine and Tools by
- Recreational Software Designs
Compiled by
Background[edit]
John Brandon:
- I liked skateboarding. I played Sega's Top Skater in an arcade and wanted to make a skateboarding game.
- This is basically a 2D platformer with a character on a skateboard. This concept would be expanded on in a much more interesting way in Skatenig.
Availability[edit]
Prior to this archive's online presence, this game is not known to be publicly available.
Archive history[edit]
On January 21st 2010, Rob Brandon pseudonymously responded to a Reddit thread with a passing comment about Game-Maker. When pressed about his history with the software, he replied that all of his games were stored on a couple of defunct computers, either inaccessible or destroyed.
Over 31 months later on August 23th 2012, John Brandon commented on a YouTube clip that he had found an archive of his and his brother's old games. The next day he composed a long e-mail describing the contents of a jumbled collection of gameware files, adding up to an ostensible sixteen games. All of the games were in pieces, many of them incomplete.
Over the next five months, through regular consultation, the games were all reassembled as well as the materials would permit. The games were reconstructed or otherwise recovered on the following dates:
|
|
Links[edit]
Downloads[edit]
- Skate Board (333.4 kB)
