Damn Skate Game status January 2023
Hi everyone!
It’s been quiet from this little skate game the last couple of months so I just wanted to give you all an update on what’s happening with the game and a quick recap of what happened in 2022.
My name is Daniel Zeller and I’m the main developer of the game. I previously made Skate City which was released on Apple Arcade. Skate City didn’t end well for me personally, it was a game I had started as a hobby project in my spare time, to which I later signed off my rights to the game over to the company I worked for at the time in exchange for being paid for working on the game. As the game grew I realized I had made a terrible deal for myself economically and in the end I got burnt out by the game and quit working on it before it was released, without getting any revenue from it. The game became a big success, it has been top 10 on the Apple Arcade since it launched and was showcased up on stage with Tim Cook when Apple announced Apple Arcade.
Fast forward a couple of years, I’m now back at working as a mobile engineer, but something was missing, I felt I had lost my skateboarding game which I truly loved with my whole heart and which meant the world to me. So during the christmas holidays of 2021 I wanted to spend some time learning Blender, specifically how to animate with it. The result was a super small prototype for a new skateboarding game, which I kept working on for the coming months. I kept posting clips on Twitter and the game gained some attention.
This was super fun and my heart was once again filled with joy over having a new skateboarding game to work on. But after a while I felt I needed some help with making maps and artwork. I was still working fulltime as a mobile developer and working on a game on evenings and weekends with 2 kids was just too much. So I reached out to Andii Ryzhov(Boris the cheater) who made the Macba modded level for SXL and I asked if I could buy his creation and make a real level out of it in the game. He was stoked and was also hired as a full time artist for the game. At the same time Nightspeeds, a legendary skate game youtuber made a video about my Twitter videos. Now things started happening and I went from spending a couple of hours on game development every evening to spending hours just answering messages from skate game fans and people that wanted to work on the game.
Anyways, the result was that we quickly became a team of 5. Me(Daniel), Andrii, Koen Dekkers(Bralunit), Mike Crook and Erik Frank. Still funded from my own pocket. The first couple of weeks were quite fun. We wanted to make an AA game and made huge plans. At the same time I still worked 100% as a mobile dev and coordinating a team of 5 wasn’t easy. Putting 5 people from different parts of the world together at the same time and expecting them to work flawlessly together was probably a bit naive of me. There was definitely quite a lot of tension between team members after a while and things didn’t flow as smoothly as I had hoped for. For me, a team of 5 meant it was very difficult to actually be able to do any game development myself since I had to spend all my time communicating and coordinating work. So after a while our 5 person team became 3. Me, Andrii and Frankie, this was a more manageable team size and I felt we were very productive together. Our goal was to get funding from publishers and we managed to ship off a demo around October 2022. Sadly that didn’t take. I felt I had to rush it too much and I felt like all I created was complete garbage(that’s what comes from working too much).
Shortly after the demo, I bought a house and being knee deep in mortgage loan I’m not sure if I could afford going fulltime dev on the skate game even if we got funding. So I couldn’t afford to keep paying the team after that. Since October I’ve been taking a development break from the game. Meanwhile an ex memeber of the team started working on his own skate game. Which kinda feels a bit shady since he had access to all my work and our ideas. But I’m sure Mike isn’t really a crook and doesn’t reuse my assets in his own project, lol (Update: Talked to Mike and getting some assurances we’re good and the project is erased)
The Session launch was better than I had thought, EA is throwing money at Skate, True Skate launched a weird thing, Skate Story is right around the corner, so IDK.. The market situation is definitely kind of crowded right now.
January 2023(now):
Looking back at what happened. Damn. That’s a lot. “Damn” is the working title of the game by the way. The fall of 2022 was way too stressful and my anxiety levels were through the roof. So going forward I’ll probably go solo dev on the game as a hobby project. With a team it’s simply too hard to stay in control of my own spare time. I just want to use my time on learning stuff and doing what’s fun. If the result is a game, then that’s awesome. If not, I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’ll keep growing as a person. I’m slowly getting back into development so stay tuned!
Thanks for reading everyone. And also a huuuge shout out and thank you to the legends Frankie and Andrii who put an insane amount of work, love and effort into making the demo.
Cheers Daniel
