CARVE SNOWBOARDING

Developer/publisher Chuhai Labs Format Quest Release 2021

I was one of the backers of the Oculus Rift DK1. As soon as I got the DK1, I just started playing around with ideas, and one of them was a snowboarding sim. It took a while to figure out what controls work and how to make it so that people weren’t throwing up all the time.

We did try attaching sensors to your legs to try and control the board, and that ended up being way too difficult. Because you’re not actually moving down the slope, you don’t have any of the forces acting on you, so you can’t turn using your legs. What we did find is that if you just hold your arms how you naturally hold them when you’re snowboarding, you can just extrapolate all the other inputs from that. You don’t realise you’re controlling it with your arms, which is quite a cool aspect of it. At one point, I tried strapping the sensors to an actual snowboard and getting it strapped in and seeing if that worked. That doesn’t work whatsoever, and I injured myself quite a few times.

I purposefully didn’t look at any other games, especially snowboarding games. They didn’t have any influence on what we were making, which was slightly worrying because I had no way of gauging whether what we were making was good or bad. When we say it’s a spiritual successor to 1080, it was more about two aspects: the physics model, which I based off the original 1080 – but obviously with newer hardware you can do much better physics, so I updated all that. Then, the two modes: the time attack and the score mode. I guess that’s the 1080-ness of the game.

I spend most of the winter up a mountain. Basically every weekend, we’d go snowboarding. I’ve tried skiing – it doesn’t really do much for me. Maybe it’s because I’m not very good at it. There’s something about snowboarding that, once you get into the zone and you’re just going down some really pristine white, soft snow and you’re gliding, it feels like you’re flying almost, flying through clouds. It’s an amazing feeling. You get a real high buzz out of it.

Whitewater Wipeout took just a few weeks of work between Goddard and artist Peter Traylor, a refreshingly fast-paced project for both of the creators – clearly Playdate’s cunning little crank proved inspirational

Developing Carve Snowboarding, which players control with their arms, for the wireless Oculus Quest felt like a no-brainer to Goddard. “It fits it much better than, say, [an Oculus] Rift or PSVR,” he observes