The Game Reviews: With Stoked, are you aiming to present a more realistic representation of snowboarding, a more arcade experience, or somewhere in between? How does the analog-based control scheme facilitate your intentions? Do you feel the control system is an improvement over other snowboarding games?

Peter Anthony Chiodo ("Tony"): Stoked is a realistic snowboarding game. Stoked is a game about style and finesse so our analog stick-driven controls allow players to trick how they want to off of any feature in the game. The farther or more shallow and the faster or slower you move a thumbstick determines the extent and speed of a specific trick. The player can use the sticks to ride the mountain in a way that really suites individual style and taste.

TGR: It has been stated that each mountain will be extremely large in size. How did you handle maintaining this large a scope? Why do you feel an open-world structure is best suited for Stoked over a more traditional level system? Do you feel sticking with the open-world structure has outweighed any development complications?

Tony: All five mountains in Stoked are huge. In Snowboarding games, traditionally, play space size is traded for run length. All other snowboarding games to date have presented players with a single mountain face or just a single run at a time. This creates an artificial world that also really limits the degree to which you can explore. The more limited the exploration, the more limited the lines you can craft on your board. But there are additional ramifications that need to be considered: the impact on the player to fully experience all that the environment has to offer as an interactive element and the careful balance of play space size with how it is populated with interactive objects. All of these things translate into “character” and if this character is not developed for the play space the game experience for the end user ends up being quite flat. The mountain is really the star attraction. It is the thing you see the most, so you really need to focus a lot of attention on it as a development priority. You want players to say… “hey, that’s cool. I wonder what’s over there, behind that tree…”

A large play space is nothing more than a big space if there isn’t much to do in it. We have worked very hard to ensure that there are not only a lot of trick features but a lot of different game play challenges to tackle all over the mountain. I was giving a demo in November and the person to whom I was presenting made the comment “I really love that you can finish a challenge, ride around for a few seconds, and then there is another, unique, fresh challenge to play right there. Stoked features both a large play space with a lot of things to do AND long runs so you have the freedom to do what you want, anywhere you want, as long as you want, based on the current conditions.

The biggest challenge in developing an open world structure is making sure everything fits in memory and that the game is smooth. This took a fair amount of work, but we have achieved this and have layered in features like dynamic time of day and dynamic weather that makes each game play session unique.