Week 5

For this week the game I will be breaking down tony hawk pro skater 3, mainly because it is the only sport game I ever really put hours into even though it was many years ago. The act of skateboarding is a lot harder than one would think, just propelling yourself forward takes a lot of practice. The main problem with translating a sport with such a high threshold is that you have to make it easy and fun to learn the controls by simplifying the steps needed to make it work. I mean there isn’t a mechanic for when you hit a pebble and it sends you flying even though it happens a lot more than you would think. The way that Tony hawk pro skater 3 handles this is to make doing tricks and movement an extremely simple series of button presses, but that raises the problem of how to translate it what buttons do what tricks and how do we distinguish which means what at what time. I still don’t know how to do tricks but I know that one movement could be used in different contexts in order to do different things. Would this change how you do the inputs or would you be able to make the inputs longer or use the same input for different movements since that is how it can work in the real sport. I think that in order to properly analyze how it works is by making the simplest method for how it works and breaking down what does what. Tony hawk pro skater 3 does a great job of deconstructing the methodology of making tricks possible with the movement of the joystick corresponding to the directions you can move the board both in air and on the ground. It is also a challenge to design levels that are conducive to skating using just city scapes neighborhoods and other things, since most of these places that the levels are designed after are horrible places to skate in actuality. The neighborhood is one example I will go with, if you’ve ever driven on the roads of a neighborhood you’ll notice they are usually not very well maintained they are rough and not to mention the sidewalks that can have gaps and elevation differences that’ll send any good or new skater on their face in seconds flat.