Welcome back to The Weekly Grind, San Vanners! Let’s roll! What’s going on? Welcome to Season 5! As a quick refresher, hit the Season 5 blog to get the details of what’s on the table for this season (S.U.M.R. Camp, Underflips and Improved Footplants, updated Progression system, Player created Spot Battles now available in the Throwdown menu, Block Parties, new brands, new music, and more!)
Plain white socks are in your inventory when you login - FREE.
We’ve got two interviews in this week’s The Weekly Grind, from our gameplay folks who worked on Underflips and Improved Footplants: Lance - Sr. Software Engineer, Shanna - Software Engineer, Dominique - Sr. Software Engineer, Alex - Sr. Technical Gameplay Animator.
Don’t forget: Keep sharing your bugs/issues so we can squash ‘em flat.
Let’s dive right into the calendar.
The Weekly Grind returns (that’s today!)
New Weekly Tasks (also today!)
S.U.M.R. Camp Interview with Brad and Elliot
The Weekly Grind Interviews: Underflips
The Weekly Grind Interviews: Improved Footplants
Slamiversary Video Contest
Anniversary Sweeps in Discord
What other types of interviews would you want to see? Let us know - gameplay, tricks, world design, etc.
Season 5 brings a massive 16 variations of Underflips, which is more than we've ever seen. How did the design team decide which variations to include, especially highly technical ones like the Nollie Hospital Heelflip? Alex: We always want to do more than just add things in from past games. To start, it was looking at what our legacy titles had and we redid all of those first, and then it was figuring out what more we could add. We said hospital flips could be cool, but then you also get to match each direction, so it transforms into a heelflip, nollie hospital flip, and nollie hospital heelflip. So we added the hospital flips, which add 4 variations, and the impossible, which also adds 4 new variations.
Lance: For hospitals, they were an interesting one because we have the flick to flick with a kickflip underflip, and then we have the scoop to flick with a shove underflip, but we didn't have flick to scoop. So it was this obvious input space of why that shouldn't work. Hospital flips - that is a new trick for skate. We wanted to add a plus-one to it. I think they are a really stylish and satisfying trick, so once we saw the input space was there and it is a new trick we can bring in, it was a pretty obvious addition. The Impossible Underflips were inspired by some real-life tricks that we saw. There are some skaters who do something like that, and we wanted to bring in something that people have been excited about in real life and represent that in the game. The community is stoked to see Underflips arrive in skate., me included. Mechanically, how has the underlying input and feel of the trick been updated to match the flow and physics of this new era of skate.?
Lance: Making sure the inputs felt responsive with how our skater works was a big part of getting Underflips feeling right, so that when it felt like you did the input, your skater was responding and doing the catch and reversing the flip. We put work into that because the timing window is tight to go from a kickflip to a kickflip underflip. We needed to spend time making that as generous as possible to support a wider range of input speeds.
Shanna: The input response was a big one. I think also just making sure it works for people who aren't as experienced in skate., who might not be used to the inputs or flicking the stick super fast to get the trick to play. We had a bunch of players who didn't grow up playing the older titles in the franchise and had never really done Underflips, making it nearly impossible for them to land one. So we spent a lot of time refining the inputs to make sure they could get it too, not just the experienced veterans. With the new SUMR Camp Mega Park introducing huge mountain gaps and mega lines, how do Underflips allow players to maximize their style and technical scores in these massive air situations? Lance: Actually, I would say no. I would say it's the other way. We wanted to still ensure that we're doing more street-level stuff alongside. We didn't want to focus the whole season entirely on just big-air mega stuff. This is actually something we hope to see a lot of street-style skaters doing, or realism-style skaters appreciating Underflips as well. Yes, you can do them in the big airs and everything like that, but it is really more of a technical trick to get really nice, detailed lines. Where we did work on S.U.M.R. Camp, it was actually a lot of work just getting the gameplay to work there in general because of all the high speeds and big airs. We were making sure that it holds up on its own, and here you go, you get Underflips too. Go have fun with those everywhere. They belong in all styles of skating if you like them.
Alex: Exactly. This is for the street too, not just the big mega ramp, and that's cool.
The Season 5 blog mentions new Bounties and an overhauled progression system. How heavily will players need to rely on mastering these Underflip variations to conquer Season 5's new challenges and Spot Battles?
Lance: Our approach there is that, as we add new tricks, we want to integrate them into the other parts of the game that both teach and test players on these kinds of tricks. We want someone to discover Underflips because a task asks them to, and because we know not everyone goes digging around in Skatepedia to find these things. That is a great way to introduce things. At the same time, we know these are tricks that a lot of people will have to practice, so we don't want to go straight to the max difficulty of testing these things right away, either.
One of the good things about being an evolving game is that we can introduce things and have a skill test that's appropriate for that part of the lifetime of a trick. Then, as we see how players do with them, we can start integrating them into more difficult situations. I think, in terms of spot battles, it is neat because it lets players show a new level of mastery as they get better at these things. That always feels nice. We hope that the more time they spend with them, the more likely they are to pull these tricks out of their pockets on demand.
What were the biggest animation hurdles in making that mid-air board flick and catch look naturally smooth and stylish?
Alex: We can do low ones, so that was a pretty tricky one to do. You have to animate them faster than they were before in Skate 3, for example. We had to do everything faster, so to make it read well, we did a lot of back-and-forth and added a little pause before flicking back up. If it were done in a single motion, it would be really hard to read what was going on. A lot of work went into the feel of that under-flick to make it feel good.
All Underflips start with a regular flip trick, so they always begin with the regular animation. We have to start from that base, and it branches from the input window you have. If it's a kickflip underflip, it will start with the regular kickflip. If you enter it correctly, it will blend into the underflip itself.
With incredibly complex variations like the Front Foot Impossible Underflip, how did the team go from a regular fliptrick into Underflips? Like from Front Foot Impossible to a Front Foot Impossible Underflip?
Alex: We started from the regular tricks and did the Underflips after through keyframes. It was a lot of work, and a lot of back-and-forth went into that.
Lance: Because we are a game, we want to represent all of these tricks symmetrically. We want you to be able to scoop and flick in any of the four directions for the scoop. We may have to cover things you wouldn't commonly see in real life. We want to cover all our bases and all the directions. That is always a goal of ours. We don't want it to feel like, "Why can't I impossible underflip that way?”. You can do all four always. Hospital flips, you can do all four. Combo lines are everything to the community, linking one trick to another while keeping it smooth and clean. How did you ensure that the transition from a complex Underflip directly into one of the newly improved Footplants feels entirely fluid, without losing momentum?
Lance: We always want to make sure we are building our new tricks in such a way that they systemically fit into the game well, and you can always branch from one type of action to another. Essentially, once you are done with an underflip, you are just in an air state, and you can do anything else that you can usually do from an air state at that point. So if you have airtime, do a grab, do a foot plant. The bridging point there is that you have done the underflip, now you are into your footplant timing. Making those fast and responsive is what we are looking for.
Any final thoughts? Shanna: I think one thing that Johnny (Gameplay Engineer and sponsored skateboarder) mentioned while we were working on Underflips was that he had never seen an Underflip happen in a skate park before, and I think it would be cool if this brought Underflips to skate parks. If people were seeing this in-game, they're like, “Oh, I want to try that.”
How did the team focus on getting flatground footplants to be smooth and feel good?
Dominique: With the foot plants, because it is a move that just follows from doing a board grab with the foot extended, you can just branch back into an air state, but if you hold on to it until you approach a landing, then we just want to flow naturally into a foot plant. We have no control over when the user enters input, and we want to enable them to pull off foot plants as often as possible, as long as they are entering input. Getting them to happen quickly was a big challenge we had to address.
If you are falling from really high and you have a leg extended, we sort of want you to have that bracing-for-impact animation playing out as you brace for impact, not significantly beforehand. But now, if you have very little time, we have to snap you into it, so we always scale the animation playback to coincide with your landing.
Lance: Another cool thing we got with flatground footplants that I was really happy to see was that, on flat ground, you can hit a kickflip to footplant. You can get flip tricks even in that short time window, and I think it is just great that the options that open up.
With Season 5 officially introducing four distinct new variations (Judo, BS, FS, and Fast Plant) after the work done in 0.31.5, what went into the decision-making process for choosing these specific tricks to expand the player's core Footplant toolkit?
Dominique: The foot plants - we just want them to flow naturally from the one-foot board grabs. Given that we have two shoulder buttons to pick right or left hand, and two face buttons to pick right or left foot, we already had one-foot board grabs in there. So then these were just the foot plants that you can do naturally from those board grabs. And I guess the judo one just had to be in there because it is a pretty badass-looking animation.
Lance: Instead of expanding beyond the base footplant tricks, we wanted to make sure you could do more with those footplants. We made sure that when you spin out of a foot plant, it felt right, that you would have directional control coming out of a foot plant. So if you hold the left stick down, you can come back in the way you came. Say you go up a bank, then you can hold the left stick down to come back down the bank, and you can aim out of your footplant. We wanted to give that expression and autonomy. We also wanted to make sure it fits in with other types of air tricks, so now you can do a backflip into a foot plant, then a front flip out of it.
The Season 5 blog highlights adjustments to ensure Footplants feel smooth and natural across every situation. From a technical standpoint, how does the game dynamically adjust the animation and foot-to-ground physics when a player triggers a Footplant on irregular or steep terrain compared to a flat ledge?
Dominique: Ordinarily, when you launch a jump, we are trying to anticipate where you are going to land because we want the best outcome for the user, so we want them to be able to land somewhere that they can skate out of. However, we don't know in advance that the user is going to input a foot plant, and when you are foot planting, you are obviously not skating out of things.
We are always checking while you are in the air and doing the foot plant input if there are opportunities. Given that your leg is extending further, it increases your reach, and you have the potential to land on much smaller surfaces than you would if you were trying to skate out of something, like on lampposts, fence posts, and rails. We are always checking to see if your foot can intercept something along the way. If so, and things are oriented correctly, we can just make you land on it and take off.
Lance: That is a really great point, too, because it brings obstacles as playable spaces that you really couldn't do much else on. Like the tops of little lights, or the edge of some pillar that you couldn't really skate on. Now you can chain that together with a foot plant, so it actually really opened up the world in a lot of interesting ways.
There is a new set of Challenges and Bounties specifically built to feature these improved Footplants. How do these events challenge players to use the new variations creatively rather than just using them as standard, straightforward tricks?
Lance: I'd say for this, you can combine those of just new mechanics, and what do you do with those in terms of integrating them into the game? We roll it out, and we hope these are teaching moments to introduce players to these mechanics, and then to see what depth to add over time for how these things are asked of players to skill-test them.
A great Footplant is all about momentum and "steeze." How did the animation and design teams collaborate to make sure the aggressive style of the new Judo Footplant or Fast Plant doesn't interrupt the fast, fluid momentum players need for high-speed lines?
Dominique: Another thing we do to enable the user to perform foot plants in circumstances they might otherwise be unable to is that we let the skater move really fast. If you were to stick a foot down on the ground while moving across the ground really fast, you just couldn't do it. So what we do is attenuate the skater's velocity briefly as they land, but we don't want that to kill their velocity or their line. What we do then is feed most of the velocity that they had going into the foot plant back into the skater. That way, you see this little moment where there is a bit of a pause, and then you feel like it really connected with the ground. But then we just keep your momentum going so that you can do the next trick.
We wanted to share a few pieces of content that caught our eye. Remember: if you want to be featured in The Weekly Grind, make sure to share yours (screenshots, videos, clips) via skate.reel.
QD and a pile of junk = new spot in S.U.M.R. Camp; Credit: ZhXiiE Hangin' with squatch; Credit: Nalar S.U.M.R. Camp skater memorial? Credit: ClarityCon
Part of The Weekly Grind will be dedicated to sharing the current Known Issues the team is tracking, any active deployments/fixes, and next steps.
Some Players are unable to export in MP4 Format.
Workaround PC ONLY: Using WebM format when exporting works.
Changing the graphics preset doesn’t update the settings shown at the bottom of the Graphics screen as it should.
Tailslides and Noseslides are not correctly detected when approaching a ledge from its end.
Wallride detection often causes skater to flip unnaturally.
Smith to Tailslide task often fails to register when done correctly.
X-Games Intro Video, Mission, Tasks and Challenges are missing on first login.
Quick Ollie/Nollie into No-Foot Grab causes leg clipping with board.
Some flip trick animations appear different in the Replay Editor when done by other skaters.
Some specific landing animations make the skater's upper body snap upright immediately.
Game intermittently fails to enter Quick drop mode from the radial menu
Workaround: Hold D-Pad Left as a shortcut to enter Quick Drop mode.
Traffic and Pedestrians are sometimes Present During Challenges.
Workaround: Turn off Challenge Player Visibility in Settings.
Switch or nollie 360 inward heelflip rotates the skater if PS5 power saving is enabled.
Workaround: Disable Power Saver for skate.
Skater spawns off-board and camera tracking freezes when resetting Session Marker set at a ledge in drop-in position.
Rarely the title crashes when you select San Vansterdam at the Ferry Terminal in SUMR Camp.
Mini stutters are present while traversing the map on Xbox One.
skate.Pass shortcut does not work when opening the Bounties menu from D-Pad.
The parental restriction for communication on consoles doesn't affect the in-game setting and functionality.
When the field of view is set above 90, LOD causes aggressive texture changes each time the skater switches from onboard to offboard.
Gen 4 console users can get stuck in loading screens when Gen 5 console and PC users frequently use co-op travels.
The prompt received after getting kicked states that users don't have access to San Vansterdam instead of the location they've attempted to enter without access.
Block Party UI fails to appear when spawning inside an active Block Party.
Borderless full screen mode accidentally uses the last resolution set by the Full Screen resolution setting.