In my youth, I fondly remember spending hours in front of the TV – when not spent skating or surfing outside – tapping buttons trying to beat my younger brother at Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer. It was the cause of numerous beatdowns when I lost, and unadulterated gloating when I won – a fact my brother continues to remind me of well into adulthood. When he got into a bar fight defending a friend a few years ago, though, my mom asked my brother where he learned to fight, and he said growing up with an older brother. So, I guess you could say video games saved my brother from a lashing in a bar.
Anyway, as fun as Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer was, it never really resembled surfing. Hell, if you got your special up you could do kickflips in the barrel, ollie full rotations on the open face, and you always had enough speed. The canon of surf video games isn’t much better, and for good reason. Compared to skateboarding and snowboarding where you begin standing and obstacles are stationary, in real life surfing there’s so much that goes into popping up on a wave. And once you do, the wave is constantly changing – it makes the sport beautiful, but doesn’t translate well into video games.
Still, a few surfing video game developers think they may have come up with the best representation of surfing to date in video game form. We caught up with Andrew West of Bungarra Software in Perth to get the scoop and find out what makes their forthcoming game The Surfer different:
What about past surfing video games made you want to develop your own?
A really good question. We got to see from our competitors what worked and what didn’t. Circumstance forced us to sit on the sidelines and watch others. The market feedback on those games was an important learning tool for us. We respect aspects of our competitor’s work, but as with any piece of art, they all have their flaws. The two games that stood out were Kelly Slaters Pro Surfer and Transworld Surf. The KSPS game was beautiful. But then anything that guy does is going to be great, he’s just an awesome over-achieving-human. The KSPS pros were the games graphics, its superb animation, and general presentation. Cons were an endless wave, no genuine gameplay with paddling & duck-diving and a Tony Hawk styled control schematic that suits skateboarding better than surfing. With Transworld, again, the presentation was nice graphically and all of the vital elements of surfing were there – duck-diving, paddling, great camera etc. Cons were that the wave was slow, feedback as to why you wipeout was vague and the game structure is largely task based. In the end, both games set the benchmark that could allow us to improve this experience.
The Surfer’s PUMP feature relies on speed to complete maneuvers which sets it apart from past games. Photo: Bungarra Software
What do you think were the reasons past video games couldn’t get surfing exactly right?
There are a few reasons. In our view, the main reason (to date) is that there hasn’t been a breakthrough in the simple – “what do you do to score” question. Another reason is a fundamental misunderstanding in the games industry of what surfing is in comparison to skateboarding or snowboarding. It’s neither. Those two genres naturally translate well to games. In the video game world, skateboarding and snowboarding have advantages over surfing in that you can simply jump on a skate or snowboard and move in a forward direction, perform a basic trick and then score quite easily. Broadly speaking the learning curves for these games are gentler and you can interact with the environment for both. Surfing on the other hand, has natural impediments in the form of paddling, duck-diving, reading the ocean and to boot, we only interact with water. Water and waves are super hard to code, and then once created there is generally not a lot for the non-surfing player to do, which is a disincentive for larger publishers, who may have considered investing in the genre. Simply put, for the non-surfing gamer: you can move to the left of the screen, to the right of the screen, or up and down and that’s it. So at face value, for the game industry at least, surfing doesn’t translate as well in their minds. The industry’s answer so far has been to take pinch of skateboarding, a dash of snowboarding, throw in the odd license and voila… surfing game! As an industry we lack the understanding that a lot of the stoke in surfing has to do with the feel of the drop, a rail in the water, of that re-entry you didn’t think you’d pull off and on top of that we give people sometimes trivial task-based goals that have nothing to do with the sport. A core mechanic should be reflective of the sport it is meant to represent; that’s just basic common sense and to a degree, common courtesy to surfers. The other issue is that often surfers aren’t actually involved in the projects day to day. “Consulting” isn’t enough.
Photo: Bungarra Software
What are some specific things that make The Surfer different?
As a 3 man indie shop we already know we just can’t compete graphically with the big publishers, so coming from a place of meager means, we knew we had to pick our battles. Our aim in developing The Surfer was to create the most in-depth surfing game we could by focussing on the sport of surfing. Out of all of this emerged our unique PUMP control, a method that centers on the player using the physics of the wave to generate speed in order to combo. The faster you surf, the higher you score. You can’t just button mash and expect to combo, so there’s a real skill to surfing in our game that you will pick up through the controller. Another cool feature is our tactile button input; the longer you hold your button in for wave moves, the harder you carve which means that if you press a button on the controller and hold a wave move in, then you slide sideways before wiping-out if you hold too long. Basically, you can power-slide on the wave in a similar way to a power-sliding/ breaking in a car. This feature alone is unique for surfing games. We put out a small prototype on PC a few years back. One of the major criticisms we received was that at times the physics-based system was a little too real, a bit too difficult to just pick up and play in comparison to skating or snowboarding games. We listened and tweaked. While we don’t interact with anything but a wave, the cool thing about PUMP is that it utilizes the same methods integral to both snowboarding and skateboarding, namely, speed and tricks. Combine this with an environment that consistently changes randomly – specifically, waves that either roll or tube at different times along with genuinely different locations, then suddenly you have a new way of thinking of how a surfing game could play.
What do you think gamers will like most about The Surfer, and what do you most want people to get out of it?
That’s first question is probably best left for others to judge, but what we’d hope surfers notice are the smaller things we’ve put effort into. For example, the waves don’t just break or barrel endlessly and really you need to hunt tubes out. You can also surf peaks and you get bonus points for backdoor barrels you also need to hunt out. For example, we’ve developed a pretty rad beach break which is a bit like a mutant D-Bah but set in France, where we run three peaks at once. There’s also a bit of aggression in the A.I. (artificial intelligence surfers), we focus largely on how the equipment affects gameplay, so for example, a small fish surfboard is loose and rotates well in the air whereas a gun is super-fast off the mark but tighter to turn. On the wetsuit side, if you select a heavy steamer in tropical conditions it is going to have an impact on your paddling stamina and the opposite applies to a pair of board-shorts in freezing conditions. We combine the selection of board and suit to give you a performance outcome. You can repair a board when it snaps, and in the DLC we are adding a feature where you can shape your own board. There are other pretty rad features too, such as riding your jetski and towing into hard-to-paddle-into waves, setting a special 3rd to 1st person tube camera, so lots of cool smaller stuff that all adds up. In the end we hope surfers kinda get it and can see that we’re having a crack and trying to do something for them. With a little luck, we’ll consistently improve as we go along. That’s all we can do.
