Skate Story with Sam Eng

0:00Jeffrey Morgan:Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression, but Skate Story takes the genre in a radically different direction. It has a distinct vaporwave vibe and blends fluid skate mechanics with exploration, puzzles, and an existential narrative about freedom, pain, and obsession. The game was created by indie developer Sam Eng, who previously released Zarvat for the Nintendo Switch. SkateStory launched to critical acclaim and was widely regarded as one of the best games of 2025. In this episode, Sam joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing SkateStory.

0:41Jeffrey Morgan:Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry's Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

1:14Jeffrey Morgan:Sam, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me on. So to kick us off, let's talk about your journey into game development. How did you become an indie game developer and what led you to Skate Story today?

1:26Sam Eng:yeah i mean i think for me game development was like i didn't know it was a real thing that people could do because you play games as a kid and you're like oh i like games and they just kind of appear from the ether so i didn't think that it was like a real you know job but then i saw these people making games online i remember reading like rock paper shotgun and they would have this weekly roundup of like free games and then these were just like indie developers so i would play some of them and then there's this one developer named inkpare or goes by inkpare that just would make all these games and put them on the website and i remember seeing like some of the source code for some of their games so i would just kind of download them and like tinker with them and i saw that they were using this like back in the day they were trying all these like different softwares and i saw one that was like called unity so i downloaded it like unity 2 or something unity 3 and i was like oh this is kind of cool like i could probably make like a little silly thing that's how i kind of got started that's awesome so you got started in the

2:34Jeffrey Morgan:context of free games obviously we mentioned there in the intro some of your commercial ventures did you kick about any free games before you got into i guess the doing it for money part yeah i made

2:43Sam Eng:some like really really stupid games for my friends just like kind of like meme games yeah this was maybe like 2011 or something just for like school friends i made like this one game that was sort of like a montage parody game i don't know if you know but like you know back in the day when kids would play call of duty or like other first person shooters like counter strike and then there was like this whole genre of meme video where they would edit these like montages of like spinning around and doing headshots and stuff so it took me probably a month to like figure out how to measure the angle of rotating the first person shooter camera and then shooting the gun so i like implemented this really simple gun like a sniper rifle and you had to like turn your camera quickly 360 degrees and then shoot like this little cue that's so funny if you didn't do that then the gun wouldn't do any damage yeah so it's funny i think

3:47Jeffrey Morgan:i think that game would absolutely pop off nowadays with like i don't know if you've seen but like the xbox 360 has made a comeback this last year loads of people have been doing like getting their xbox 360s out and playing call of duty and like phase clan became a thing again so like the trick shot the no scope 360 trick shot montage video game would absolutely slap right now i think but that's incredible and also funnily enough i think brings us nicely the skate story because that is another game about doing sick tricks. Would you like to tell us about what Skate Story is?

4:16Sam Eng:Yeah, it's another game where you could do a 360, but on a skateboard. So I just released Skate Story, which is a skateboarding game where he plays this glass demon who is skating through the underworld who's trying to eat the moon.

4:32Jeffrey Morgan:Perfect. What more pitch does the game need? I actually want to start, before we get into the technical bit, I want to start with that because I have this whole... okay bear with me listeners am sam i have this whole thesis about like movies from the like 2010s to 2020s that i think relates to the skate story which is like there was a period of time where every movie that had like fake science really went out of its way to justify its fake science and it's like plots and etc and i think pacific rim killed that by saying there are giant robots there are giant aliens they're fighting it's rad let's go i felt very similarly about starting up a skate store and being like you're a demon you need to eat the moon you're made of glass you have to skateboard to the moon it's rad let's continue so i guess i kind of wanted to ask you like it's such an interesting premise but it is just offered wholesale to like the player no justification just like cool this is the thing how do we go how do you approach because it's also strikes me as like actually quite intricate and developed there's lots of things there that you go like oh that's a really neat idea like how do you approach writing for a game like this did the writing and this concept come first or was it very much did it come around to justify the gameplay

5:36Sam Eng:mechanics if you get what i mean well i would say the name of the game actually came very very early on i was like oh okay i want to make a game about skateboarding i want it to be a vaporwave skateboarding game and then i want it to be like a linear story game and then i remember thinking of like a couple of different titles and then i was like i really want the word skate in it because I don't want people to know it's a skateboarding game. And then I really want people to know that's not a sandbox game. Like it's a linear story game. So I was like, oh, well, I guess it's going to be called Skate Story.

6:11Sam Eng:Because I want every player to know that it's a linear adventure game. And then I always knew it was a Vaporwave game. And then I always had the idea shortly afterward, when I made the game, that it would be a game about skating down into the underworld. so all of that came about from that initial premise of you're skating down into the underworld what does that entail and then the majority of the writing was based off of that and then would have to be changed as you probably would think with the gameplay so i'd be like okay well i really want there to be a giant goal something for you to reach that you could see really easily so the moon came about really quickly because it's like okay well i want you to be able to go towards something that you can see very easily in terms of the gameplay standpoint and what easier to see than a giant orb in the sky right so i was like all right got the moon there and things just kind of kept growing from there in terms of why are you trying to go to the moon well obviously to eat it because it looks so delicious of course how do you get to the moon with the skateboard all these things and then putting that into the actual story you know at the beginning of the game you see the moon and you're so like as the demon you're so tired and hungry so you're like oh wow i want to eat the moon and then you get offered a contract that's and the narrator is essentially like well the only way to reach the moon is skateboard

7:43Jeffrey Morgan:perfect yeah the glass as well like you being made of glass i think is just such a cool detail out as to like it really adds a physical experience you falling off your board but also like you immediate like the minute it said how you're made of glass i was like oh so falling on my board is going to be like it right and it's just such a neat twist so speaking about being a skating game obviously you're a skater yourself and this i have so many questions about how you design the skateboarding experience but i guess i want to the start of asking you like what was important for you to capture about the physical experience of skateboarding in the game i think i started

8:17Sam Eng:very similar to some other indies where i'm like a little too obsessed with the intricacies and i was like i'm gonna make this the most realistic simulator game ever and i want to like get every single little detail in this game so when i first was thinking about it i remember just like holding a controller and being like oh maybe i'll do like this two stick control where each stick is like a foot and then you have to like flick the thing to do the specific things and then i started to maybe implement that but then i realized like this is a story game this is just a narrative adventure essentially it's a walking simulator but instead of walking you just kind of skate around so i really had to simplify the control scheme and then i was like i need to make it so anyone can just pick it up without looking at the tutorial and more or less figure it out you know they probably won't be able to figure everything out but more or less figure it out so it took a lot of iteration to get the control scheme down i would say that was generally the biggest design challenge throughout the game and i would say most people like it and most people are able to just play it some people who are really into skateboarding games have told me that it's way too simple which you know i kind of take the compliment honestly yeah it's an interesting

9:47Jeffrey Morgan:one because i mean i have further comparisons of skateboarding games later on but i think it's also a really interesting comparison to make in terms of simplicity because i always feel like not many skateboarding games have like the i guess it's more of a snowboarding game thing like you know like the fast-paced downhill almost like hurdle thing right the simple control scheme i think really lends itself to that but although you say it's simple i think there is well for me at least the timing element so for listeners who haven't played it you get like a shape with like a perfectly timed zone right that you need to hit to get maximum height on the trick and that shape gets more complicated the more complicated the trick and that really means when you're doing the fast pace segments you need to really decide when you're going to start executing the trick in order so it lines up at the right time and i've so far found that very challenging i don't know maybe i'm not very good at skateboarding games but i always miss time yeah that's really interesting

10:36Sam Eng:Well, that timing indicator is completely optional now. So yes, you do need it to essentially do a bigger jump and to get a higher score, but it's completely optional. When I first made the game, it was not completely optional. I thought it was, I mean, forgive me for tooting my own horn, but I thought it was a genius implementation of what it actually feels like to skateboard. Because when you're actually skateboarding, and I haven't seen this like shown in any game that I've played where the speed of the character affects the difficulty of a mood because usually in games it's like well you just want to go faster right like the only thing that speed really affects is like maybe racing games it's harder to turn yeah but I've never seen like oh it's harder to shoot or it's harder to jump or do anything but in skateboarding in real life that's literally how it is like when you first learn how to like do a trick you're like i guess i'll stand still because that's the easiest way to do it and then okay i maybe know how to do an ollie and now i'm gonna start moving slowly and you're like holy shit this is completely hard now and then you kind of learn that and you're like i guess i'll go at a decent pace and you're like holy shit this is super hard so it's really different to learn how to do a kickflip when you're just rolling kind of slowly versus when you're going at 20 miles per hour like down a hill it's actually really really difficult to do the kickflip and i really wanted to capture that somehow and when i realized like oh if i do the gears of war active reload but then tie the speed of the indicator to the movement that actually feels like i mean obviously it's not skateboarding but it gets the idea of cross of that thing yeah yeah

12:27Jeffrey Morgan:absolutely and i think that idea of speed is something that you carry on some really other amazing parts of the controls which i'll have to talk about so i guess one of the things that first struck me and this is because i'm constantly going into walls was you have so like the character controller and i guess when you can do certain actions was really interesting so as far as i can tell you can't interrupt a kick with a board slide right the kick has to finish before the slide will start happening how did you i guess there's just so many fast downhill segments like how did you think about really capturing that idea of like speed and momentum and danger in how you

13:05Sam Eng:designed that movement and the controls that were available yeah so for the kicking versus doing other actions that was mostly based on where the feet are so i implemented it where it's like well in real life you have to really position your feet and that's a big part of the game right of like your feet being in the right position and you use the triggers to essentially just choose the trick and then visually the feet kind of move around the board to show you okay your feet are set up in this position and you can do the trick you can't ollie if you only have one foot on the board essentially so i kind of took cues from games like from soft games where it's very like animation heavy of like okay you have to be in like the idle state to be able to do this trick so both feet have to be on the board before you can do like an ollie or something or a power slide so you have to wait until your push animation at least progresses enough so that when you press the ollie button the skater can put the foot back on the board so there aren't many animation interrupts right you can kind of interrupt but it'll take maybe like 0.1 seconds for the skater to be like okay i'm interrupting this animation i'm gonna move my foot back right more than transition and then interrupt right like yeah exactly yeah yeah but the design of that was kind of inspired by from soft games or games that are like that animation driven sort of thing yeah it's interesting

14:39Jeffrey Morgan:because you say you said it started to start saying that you went like way to over on the simulation aspect and i guess the feet needing to be in physically accurate places at the right time is like a slightly way that's retained yeah and then yeah keep with that i guess that feeling of speed i think and this also i think ties into how your trick system works which i want to get into a bit but you do lots of really well i think anyway i there's so much going on when you're going fast but you do lots of interesting things with the camera in terms of really exploiting it being in certain places to like give the idea of speed how is that implemented is that literally just the higher the speed the camera gets lower like how does your camera work yeah the camera

15:11Sam Eng:has a lot of parameters this is i think maybe the third version of the camera that i made so at its core there's like an overarching camera system but then just the camera for the player probably is this giant monster with multiple parameters of like spring arms and looking at where the player is going velocity so the idea of it was essentially to emulate a skate video or like your friend following you and trying to record you but also having it be like a third person camera that you can control so that was one of the things i really really wanted was like full user control over the camera which is not very common in racing games like games where you go fast is not very common in skateboarding games either because usually i mean an ea skate the second stick is used for like tricks right so you can't control the camera at all essentially so the camera has a lot of parameters for like which way the skater is going at what velocity if the skater is kind of going downhill or uphill or like about to do a trick or turning left or turning right and then also most of the time the camera the main goal is to make it look cool while giving you as much of a view of what's going on which is incredibly difficult because it's like a i mean it's a 2d screen and making it look cool by essentially having the skateboard front and center while showing the skater while showing where the skater is going it's like having a lot of things to keep in mind and then also at the same time allowing you to rotate the camera so for the speed mechanic as to do with like a lot of these different things there's kind of like key frames in a way of like okay when you're going slow this is about where the camera wants to be of like this is about where the camera is moving towards to like keep the skater framed and about the distance i want to keep and then at speed it changes kind of slightly but there's a bunch of parameters associated with that with like how much screen shake there is and how much microphone wind noise there is so there's essentially a sound clip of like wind hitting a microphone yeah that plays when you're going fast and then the volume and pitch of that is associated with like how fast the camera is moving not the player so right it's like actually detects like simulating okay how fast is the camera going and then playing the noise based on that so there's a bunch of the little parameters like that that associate with the speed right and i guess the trick system

18:10Jeffrey Morgan:i guess must then be a similar story because i noticed that there's if you're not going fast enough or you're not coming off a high enough bit you can't even attempt to turn the board in a lolly for example how did you decide on like i guess it comes back to what you're saying earlier about difficulties of tricks at speed but how did you decide like what movements would be possible under what conditions and how is that set up it's mostly based on just real life right

18:33Sam Eng:But then trying to make it as essentially approachable and accessible as possible. Because obviously I know that people are not going into this game looking for the most realistic simulator. And I've gotten a lot of feedback from people and play tests early on. Just like, wow, this is just so hard and so frustrating. I'm like, yeah, but that's skateboarding. And they'd be like, yeah, but this is a video game. and I'd be like okay fine and I want them to play it and like have a good time and it's more about the journey and the story than it is about the intricacies so I want to show the intricacies if you're interested but it's more about just like having a good time so I was like okay well going from the simulator thing and then making it as approachable as possible like within reason so like for example you can kind of pop the ollie whenever you want and then the foot will essentially go to the ollie position very quickly like there might be a little bit of delay but it tries to give you a little leeway while attempting at best as possible to still keep the look of the game and the simulator like it looks very realistic if that makes sense while being as friendly as possible.

19:58Jeffrey Morgan:Yeah, the idea of representing how hard skateboarding is, but still being fun, I think brings me on to deaths. Do you call them deaths? Wiping out? How do you describe when people smash in the game?

20:08Sam Eng:Yeah, I guess you kind of die. I think that's, yeah. You don't really die because demons can't die.

20:14Jeffrey Morgan:Right. They're already not alive.

20:17Sam Eng:But yeah.

20:18Jeffrey Morgan:Explode in spectacular fashion. Yeah, it's a really interesting system because it doesn't often feel bad. Like I often find myself laughing. responds to like a terrible wipeout. And it's especially on the linear segments, like the fast segments, it often feels like, oh, cool. I have another opportunity to like run that line again, but better. You know, Fidelity is a financial services leader, but did you know that inside Fidelity is a community of technologists working together to shape the future of finance and tech? Fidelity is always investing in tomorrow, from emerging tech to cutting edge tools that will transform what comes next.

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22:12Jeffrey Morgan:Get started today with$100 in free credits at recall.ai slash software. Do you have any particular inspiration for the dev system? How did you come to design that system?

22:23Sam Eng:So I think that just comes for free with a skateboarding game. I think almost every skateboarding game, like crashing or bailing out is just fun for some reason. I think mine is slightly different just because in a game like EA Skate, the ragdolls are incredibly incredibly hilarious so it's always fun to just see the guy ragdoll and you know they made a whole mode about it called hall of meat and escape where the whole goal is just to like hurt yourself and then there's like a little skeleton of where'd you hurt yourself where'd you take the most damage and people love that mode so i think that just kind of comes from free for skateboarding for some reason mine is not as funny so i'm not surprised you laughed but that's good i think the new part or the innovation which some people hate i've been told but there's an option to turn it off is essentially the camera goes rolling yeah like the camera is sort of the physical body and that came from watching skate videos in which i saw there's just one video where the skater kind of fell and it kicks the camera man like directly the camera and the camera just fucking rolls i was like wow that looks so cool and then actually if you go skateboarding so i remember once i was just trying to do a very tiny trick but then you land and then your board just kind of sticks on the ground because maybe the ground is kind of rough and then i just kind of fell in slow motion but i was going fast enough that because the board stuck, I sort of rolled on the ground.

24:09Sam Eng:And then I was going slow enough and I was just looking the whole time, like watching the whole time. And I was like, well, my literal vision, like this is what it's like to fall. It's not watching a funny rag doll. It's like my vision just rolls around. And then now I'm looking at the sky and I was like, oh wait, that's literally what it feels like. Like, of course, when you are the guy filming, you don't actually fall with the skateboarder. But I was like, when I implemented it the first time, I was like, oh, I want the camera to roll. This is what it feels like to fall, having the camera roll around of the first person vision.

24:49Sam Eng:So it kind of shifts, I guess, in game of like third person to first person feeling wise.

24:56Jeffrey Morgan:Interesting. yeah it feels like i definitely grew up playing mostly tony hawk pro skater titles it was like i missed out with ea skates my next question may end up having as an easy answer in other skateboarding games as well but i haven't experienced many skateboarding games that have boss battle systems i'm aware they're out there and have been controversial i guess but this one seems to be very well received i've definitely enjoyed it i think it's a really interesting system what led to your design the boss battles how did you think about this

25:20Sam Eng:I don't think there has been a skateboarding game with traditional boss battles. In Sony Hawk, there were like competition levels, which sort of served as like these boss battles, sort of. But like, you kind of have to squint and be like, yeah, that's a boss battle, because it's like different from the other ones. And then in EA Skate, you kind of have like a slightly harder challenge, where you have to play a game of skate, which is kind of like horse and like other sports. against like a pivotal character or something that's kind of like a boss battle but i wanted like a traditional boss battle of like yeah like this is a from soft game or this is a video game where the boss has a health bar and you have to take it down so yes i wanted that and i have not seen that however i have seen maybe kind of similar things i saw a sort of boss battle in bomb rush cyber funk what title where yeah which is sort of a spiritual successor to the jet set radio bomber cyber funk amazing amazing game and you have to essentially tag parts of the boss and then you kind of kick enemies like the minions kind of come at you and you kick them and stuff and then you do tricks and then you tag parts of the robot you tag the robot's face which kind of deals damage to it so i remember also seeing that and being like okay that's super cool and then i realized that doing tricks in those bosses don't really matter so i understood why they did that and it makes sense for that game but i was like i kind of took it upon myself where i was like okay i really want my boss battles to not have any other power familia right like i want it to just be the same doing tricks should somehow damage the boss the main thing you've been doing throughout and i want the combos and the tricks to matter and that took the entirety of development to figure out how to do that i had boss battles pretty early on because i always knew i wanted boss battles so the very first level was just like a path level of going through these gates to reach the moon and the second level i made was you're now chasing the moon and doing kickflips to damage the moon that was the boss battle and it worked but then i was like how do i take this further like i don't understand how to make this make sense and it went through so many different iterations of just like i remember i had these boss battles were like yeah you just do tricks and it damages the moon so the first one was like this chase level and that worked but then the second one was like this arena like the skate park and then i remember the feedback was just like from the publisher that was just like well you can just sit in a corner and like do kickflips and like eventually take the boss down which kind of sucks and i was like okay yeah it kind of sucks so i was like okay what if you have to go faster what do you have to like do combos and stuff and it just didn't like i would make some progress of like how to make this a little better a little better and it took i think it literally took five years throughout to fully design the boss fights to where they are now and then the last year before release was polishing everything with this new system which i don't know if you've played the guy not to like the second or third boss yet yes that's sort of really where it shows like these moon projections and then i call it the cosmic light system where essentially these projections are like the weak spots of the boss where you essentially string together a line of combos and then you end your combo in the light of the moon like this projection to deal damage to the boss yeah that's exactly i think that's

29:22Jeffrey Morgan:the last boss i did the red moon where you've got the initial chase into the arena onto the projections and you get whisked through the hallways again back to the arena and it was it was amazing it really like each stage i was like oh this is delightful this is such a good way to do the boss and then it progressed to the next stage i was like oh my god this is even like cooler take on it it was very i think hearing the journey of the arena and how the projection system came to be i think that's really cool and it adds i think as you said like the from soft element because after each like combo execute and you knock the bar obviously the moon flies away and you have to try and catch up the projection again.

29:54Jeffrey Morgan:And then you have the differing timing of its attacks on you as you're getting to the projection. And that felt very FromSofty, like having to learn, okay, what is the boss doing in between the attacks? That was a really cool element. But yeah, not surprising to hear it took five years of developing that.

30:08Sam Eng:It's a very simple system, but it took me a long time to design it. Because when you don't know the answer, you just don't. And there's so many different iterations of that boss fight of like there's one where i mean the very first one of the arena one where you could just do tricks rever and the arena actually was a completely different arena and another one where it's like oh you have to be close to the moon and do tricks and then the closer you are to its gravitational field like the more damage it does and that also kind of worked but then it was like yeah but there's no reason to do tricks outside the moon right right so then And I was like, okay, well, then maybe there's like a radius and then you can only do tricks there.

30:56Sam Eng:Anyway, it just kind of kept going and going and going. And then the pivotal point to getting all of this working was realizing, you know, in real life, when you do a combo. So in Tony Hawk, right? You've played Tony Hawk. So to compare real life to Tony Hawk. In Tony Hawk, you do a combo. and then when your wheels touch the ground when all four wheels touch the ground your combo is over which makes a lot of sense in a video game because it's like yeah it's over you ended the string of tricks and you're good to go in real life that's not how it works like you when you see your friend like do a kickflip and then he starts with a kickflip rides down a hill a little ollie's onto like a curb does a manual and then like ollie's out of the manual he's still riding he pushes a little and then he's like all right i'm gonna jump over this cone and he like does a trick over a cone his four wheels touch the ground many times doing that line but it's still a combo why is that well it's because they told you like oh okay i'm gonna do this and then i'm gonna end it with like this really cool trick over there i'm gonna like ollie off these stairs so if you watch escape videos the same thing where you could tell that they know what the last trick is of the combo they're like i'm gonna 360 flip the staircase and that's the last trick so realizing that of like oh combos don't actually end when your wheels touch the ground it actually ends when the skater says it ends and then thus began like months long iterations of like how do you end it and then i eventually came up with the system that it is now in the game which is the stomp system which stomping is a sort of like a skateboarding phrase of like oh what kind of like slang it's like oh wow he really stomped that trick or you know when people kind of teach you how to land a trick they're just like okay you like flip the board and then you stomp it which is like it flips and then it's the right way up with the grip tape facing up towards your feet and then the wheels facing down just stomp it like and like and the trick so it stops flipping so it's kind of like a skateboarding slang and i was like okay that's the ending you stomp the trick so in the game essentially you could do a bunch of tricks and there's a bit of a timer so you have like maybe a couple seconds in between each trick to kind of push and then when you want the combo to end you just stomp the trick in mid air so you just press square in midair and it ends the combo and kind of expels the momentum that you've accrued during the combo as damage so that took a long time to design yeah it's a

33:57Jeffrey Morgan:fantastic system i think it's actually not only is it realistic real life i think it's very necessary for this like genre of skateboarding game especially in the boss battles where like you know i need to do a trick but also i need to navigate around this fire that's appeared in front of me right like it makes it feel it gives you flexibility to do the engage with the other forms of gameplay rather than just the tricks which is really cool yes i guess one of the things we've kind of touched on with this and the different forms of the bosses is also you have a really interesting pacing in the game between these like linear racing sections and more sand boxy bits and then the narrative storytelling bits and i'm only you know i don't i don't think i'm even halfway in yet so i've only seen some of that so far but how did you decide to have those different forms of gameplay and how did you like decide on that pacing and spacing them out yeah

34:39Sam Eng:i would say those different forms of gameplay were i always knew that it needed them because i knew it wasn't going to be a sandbox game but i wanted some open areas and i personally love areas in games where you can just you're like okay this is like the chill hub zone and i can just kind of fuck around and i can wait essentially it's kind of like the downtime and then it's like okay then i'll like do a challenge and then continue the story and then the half levels were always like the chunk of the gameplay of like okay this is the linear driving force and from what i've heard that's like people's favorite sections of the game of just like yeah this is the music it's going and i have a very clear goal just to like reach the end and that is the game the hub areas are more to satiate that my own internal like okay well i kind of just want little places to fuck around like yeah kind of talk to the characters and do stuff and the pacing came from that yes i could have it go go go go go all the time but i didn't really want that for myself and i think the game itself like the story was well you're kind of this eternal demon and especially with skateboarding it's like it's not really just go go go go go skateboarding a lot of it is also just chilling and just being like i think a lot of people have this feeling of skateboarding is hanging out with your friends endless summers just like chilling by the flower bank and trying a trick and drinking tea like drinking iced tea and then that eternal feeling and i wanted to capture some of that obviously the game still takes place this kind of underworld but it's kind of like a cheery underworld yeah and having these open areas where yeah you can just kind of chill and you know what to do but it's like these sections that give that flavor of skateboarding that i still wanted of like exploration and in between of the really driving forces of okay now i gotta fucking get to this place and now i gotta take down this moon so i think the pacing aspect was difficult i will say i did get a few complaints about some people not liking the pacing and feeling like oh man the hub levels drag on a little bit which that's fair if somebody just wants to like play the rushes and just keep going going going but i really wanted that as part of it of like sometimes you're you get to the location that you're skateboarding and you're just kind of chilling yeah and i think that's just part of it yeah and i think you're