The previous version had a nice, simple feel to it, and since then, the game has evolved significantly. We've gone from a character doing freestyle flips with lunar gravity to a spring-mounted gymnast. It's much better, I can even say I've found the gameplay I wanted.

I'll try to be as clear as possible, but here are the big game-design decisions.

TWIST SNAP!

We help the player in situations that aren't always super aligned after twists to snap forward or backward. It makes things more satisfying, softens the difficulty a bit and simplifies a lot of things in terms of validating the tricks from a technical point of view.

LAND ON YOUR FEET

In the previous version you used to be able to bounce off your hands (which was handy if you were doing a sort of Kong leap or Yurchenko to get up on a block). You could also land on your head, which was cool at first because you could land in a roll jump. But all this makes a lot of noise, because when you land on your head, there are a lot of situations where it's not OK. Landing on your head in a half back somersault? Landing on your head from any height? That added too many special cases, complexity in the animations and in the way we calculate tricks, because I could feel that Luc (my coding guru) was trying to tell me, hey, from feet to feet you've got a flip and it'll be easier to code. He was right, it's much better all round now.

LAND OR FALL

We had a system of recovering in the event of an unsuccessful landing. Before, you could either fall or succeed, but in between you could also roll and get back on your feet. It was a nice idea but it was very vague, hard to make clear to the player and an animation headache. What's more, the game also relies on bouncing directly to link jumps with a ‘combo’ system. A recovery had the same punishing effect as a fall in the end. We opted for something much more radical.

WRITING TRICKS

Since tricks are designed to be learned progressively—and in the final game, players will discover them in small sets—we needed a clearer way to write them. For a long time, I was stuck using symbols that were somewhere between pixacaos and gymnastics judging notation. It looked nice, but it wasn’t clear at all. After several tests, we settled on a simpler language that, once understood, made everything much clearer.

TRICK DETECTION

We completely rewrote the trick detection logic. It now fully aligns with the simpler language we use to describe tricks. For each trick, we determine the ideal yaw the player should achieve and compare it to their actual movement. This approach is far more reliable than our previous system.

TRICKLIST

We now have a fully integrated trick list with approximately 47 different tricks in the game.

WHAT'S NEXT?

We have the core gameplay and a first set of tricks and things to master.  What we're going to be working on now is how to get that content into the hands of players, bit by bit, because it's still really hard out there. Then there will be the content, the game modes, the other disciplines that will enhance the game system. Stay tuned.