First of all, I've stopped drinking coffee at work, so I'm not sure if anything I write will make sense. I'm going to try and talk a little about Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam for the Wii and probably a lot about how much I miss drinking coffee. I'm the internal producer on the game at Toys For Bob.
I'm going to start by telling you how the game came about. After doing research, Activision found there was a lot of interest from Tony Hawk fans to include racing in the game, and created the concept of Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. It was then decided that Toys For Bob would make this game using the Neversoft engine as a base and modifying things where we saw fit to accommodate a downhill racing game. We started off doing a lot of experiments by building little sections of mesh and having a character skate down using current Tony Hawk physics.
The first thing we needed to determine was the slope of the hill. We wanted our game to always involve skating downhill, but quickly found out that if players just rolled down one continuous slope, it would stop feeling like you were going downhill and a lot of the sense of general speed would be lost too. Leveling out the slope in many places ironically made it feel more like you're going down. It was around this time that we began to try different configurations with the Wii Remote. We tried so many configurations -- even one that involved taping the Wii Remote to an actual skateboard, and leaning back and forth to turn. That was pretty fun, but in the end, we assumed that not everyone would want to use a skateboard as a peripheral, so we instead chose something a little more conventional, yet still fun and different.
Next we started to tweak the physics. We had to create gravity so that going down the slopes would pull your character down faster, based on the angle. Speed was a big issue in general. Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam obviously had to feel fast, so we began to modify skaters' acceleration and top speed values. The funny thing was that no matter how much we modified these values, it still didn't feel fast enough. We then made it so that the faster you went, the more narrow the field of view became. This was incredibly effective.
We wanted to have more modes of play than just racing. We did some experiments early on with slalom gates, which turned out to be a lot of fun. Also, in an effort to utilize the Tony Hawk trick system even more, we came up with a trick attack/destruction mode where the goal is to get a certain amount of points from tricking and destroying things. So each level has a slalom run and a trick run. We then created a Career mode so players compete in different kinds of events to play through the game. We also added "special events" every so often where players have a different goal than normal, such as grinding for a certain amount of time, catching a certain amount of total hang-time and knocking over as many pedestrians as possible.
So there's some basic information on how we've created Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. There's a lot of stuff I didn't cover at all, like the art look, characters, animation, or why I quit drinking. We'll try to get to that in future installments.
