TGR: Can you tell us about the Style Crafting system? As I understand it, the tricks, scoring, and even animations adjust to the player’s playstyle. What is the Style Crafting system exactly, and why does it benefit the overall gameplay?

Tony: The Style Crafting system encompasses many aspects of the game. Through play the user figures out how they like to play: either as a stylish rider or as a hucker. The more the player rides in one of these styles the more bonuses and unlockable elements that become available for that style. For example, the more you huck tricks, rotational bonuses are given to you allowing you to spin faster. In contrast, the more you perform stylish tricks you will unlock the ability to do tweaked and boned grabs and you’ll see your animations smooth out. There are a lot of other cool stylish rider VS hucker differences that we’ll let you figure out as you play the game. Both sides also have access to a series of signature pro rider moves that are earned after you beat our pro rider challenges. You have to be committed to your style though! If you start hucking tricks as a stylish rider you will start to lose your stylish riding bonuses and start to build up your hucker stats (and vice versa).

The Style Crafting system incorporates more than just Stylish Riding VS Hucker play. As your career develops you will attract sponsors who will give you an invitation to ride for them. If you beat their challenges they will give you a sponsorship offer that you can either accept or decline. As you become sponsored you will gain gear and equipment that define you as a member of a riding team. Your sponsor choices complement your tricking style choices. As a sponsored rider you will be invited to ride in event challenges on behalf of your sponsor and through our unique Battle of the Brands feature you can build buzz for your sponsor by taking the top spot on leaderboards attached to Brand Battleground tagged trick features and runs.

We also wanted players to have a signature sound. You can select a representative “theme song” (or anthem) that will play when you beat a challenge and when you drop out of a helicopter on a mountain to ride it for the first time in a play session. There are around 30 different theme song choices to choose from: reggae to hip hop, Japanese video game-inspired to trance.

TGR: The dynamic weather system looks to be very impressive, including a day/night cycle, real-time shadows, and varying snowfall. Was developing this weather system a struggle or do you feel the team planned sufficiently for the challenge?

Tony: The dynamic time of day and dynamic weather system were examples of two features that our developer and I wanted to have in the game from the very beginning. One rider’s opinion of “perfect day” might be a pounding snowstorm while another’s might be the sun is high in the sky, not a cloud in sight, and a light dusting of powder from the day before. The conditions in which you like to ride are a part of your style. Incredible amounts of time went into planning for and implementing these two features. Our developer had a lot of great ideas on aspects of both the time of day and dynamic weather features and the challenge was to make sure that the weather changed frequently enough (but not too frequently) that you felt like you were seeing different things (per mountain) across an in-game day. This led directly into our time of day system too. We didn’t want an in-game day to be perceived as either too short or too long. After a lot of trial and error we came up with a balanced system that revolves around what we think is the time length for an average game session: one hour. Then the challenge was to set the time zone differences for each mountain as our five mountains, in the real world, are all in a different time (and in some cases a different day) based on their location on the globe. Finally, we wanted to make sure that everyone across Xbox Live had the same weather and time of day settings for multiplayer game sessions (to keep things fair for all players). I’m really excited about what we have built and we have a lot of great ideas for how time of day and weather can be worked into other projects.