“Three of us on the dev team were lucky enough to work on Sunset Overdrive at Insomniac Games, and while doing first-person skating is a bit different then Sunset’s grind-heavy parkour, I really wanted to capture a similar environmentally driven flow,” Meyr explains. “While working on Sunset Overdrive I was addicted to traversing across Sunset City; I’d often travel all the way across the city to play my work, instead of using developer shortcuts, just to explore and enjoy the traversal team’s amazing job. When we started seriously considering having a skateboard in High On Life, I knew deep in my cobwebbed soul we should strive for that feeling, even if it inflated the skateboard into something much larger.”

As far as digging into the classics, the team went back and analyzed a lot of Tony Hawk games to figure out what would work (and not work) for first-person skateboarding. For example, Tony Hawk’s controls don’t work as an FPS, but served as a baseline inspiration for what skating should feel like: “It really got me thinking about layering in vert ramps, half pipes, and grinds. I played a ton of Session as well, though as much as I love it for being insanely technical, we were going for a much more simplified control scheme and couldn’t fit in something like their awesome trick system.”

Finding Inspiration from Indies

During the research and conceptualizing phase of High On Life 2, Meyr was surprised to find that there were practically no first-person skating games available, beyond some mods for Skate. Then he stumbled upon an indie game called Griptape Backbone. “It’s very chill and dreamy and got us thinking about how to cheat the board placement so it’s more visible in first person and helps ground you.”

Once it was settled that skateboarding was going to be a key feature for the next game, the team began to tackle High On Life 2’s more unique challenge – mixing both skating and shooting and making them feel fun to play. One of the largest debates that Meyr tells me about on the team was whether your aim should be independent of your movement direction while on the skateboard.

“For a long time, you could look in any direction while skating, which felt very natural and let you do some crazy moves like circling around enemies while shooting and skating backwards while still fighting,” Meyr says. “However, in playtesting, it meant we kept having to make larger and sparser arenas so you wouldn’t be running into stuff constantly because you’re not looking where you’re going!”

In the end, the team decided to lock the player’s movement to their viewpoint while skateboarding but allow free look while grinding objects – effectively, skating is all about getting to the right place, and grinding is about unleashing hell once you’re there. This simple change made navigating spaces and the overall usability of the skateboard in combat feel much better. Having navigated through a few levels in my time with High On Life 2, I get the trade-off here, as I no doubt would have bumbled into numerous walls and objects if I wasn’t looking in the right direction.

In part, that’s because of how fast the skateboard lets you travel – this is far more than a fancy sprint button, letting you cross huge swathes of a level in a way most FPS games don’t. It adds a major new dimension to combat but, given that the game has a compelling and hilarious story to tell, with tons of performances to capture, it’s also entirely possible for you to accidentally skip past a character or line of dialog if you’re not facing the right way. I asked Meyr how the team tackled this challenge, even in the moments where there wasn’t a narrative beat to adhere to.

“In the first game we typically paced gameplay to cycle between traversal, combat, and narrative beats. The skateboard fit pretty easily into the traversal piece of that formula,” Meyr explains. “Skating has a large influence on the combat aspect of the game, but we didn’t let it take over. In the end, we wanted the game to still have a lot of what makes a traditional shooter feel fun. We didn’t want the skateboard to muddy the FPS experience by having to blow out aim assist or let you move so fast enemies have to do crazy things to keep up with you.”

The game wastes little time in getting me on the board and it isn’t long until I’m unleashing this tandem of skateboarding and shooting in High On Life 2, like sliding across powerlines as I dispatch a variety of alien goons in the opening zoo level. The skateboard never feels like it gets in the way of the shooting; it amplifies it, nudging me to mix it into my newfound ability to reach alien foes on rooftops who would otherwise be inaccessible without it.

The first game already featured a lot of verticality and unique traversal elements thanks to the Gatlians like Knifey and their grapple ability – but the skateboard only intensifies that ambition. Grinding, riding in sewer pipes, and wall riding all create opportunities for unexpectedly complex riding options in the environment. Every level features unique opportunities to test your skills, like navigating across a mix of floating rails and pools, giant balloons to bounce on, and other zany obstacles while traversing the planet ConCon as one such example.

Board riding can also be vital, as highlighted in some of the boss fights so far. With the bounty hunter Sheath, it took place in a large room with slanted, quarter-pipes that run up the walls, making for plenty of opportunities to remain on the move while dishing damage. Or fighting against Brutakis, the mini-boss of MurderCon, the entire zone felt like a skatepark with plenty of ramps, rails, and stairs to navigate. This all feels designed with purposeful intent to keep you moving to help bring a natural fun and flow to the battle.

Letting Go of Your Hands

It’s always a balance to teach a new mechanic to a player while making it not feel like you’re holding up the momentum of the game. Initially, the team did a lot of “hand holding tutorial” tests for the skateboard and found it made for a terrible experience. In the end, they pared the tutorials back until they were just hitting the essentials and letting the player grasp and play with the mechanics on their own time.