Nearing 30, it seems that once every few years I drift back towards game dev. Regardless of what idea I have in my head to create (this time it was Shin Megami Tensei but with cats), it always drifts back towards a Jet Set Radio Future clone/spiritual successor/demake.
I also miss rambling in blog posts, and looking at my old blog, I used to write a lot. And I haven’t written a single post since I started employment post-PhD.
The landscape the past few years for “JSRF-likes”, has been decent. While it’s not like us fans are feasting, it’s not been completely devoid of content:
In my opinion, what makes a “JSRF-like” game can be broken into three components:
Style (visual, audio, and story)
Fluid Movement
Skating Obstacles
Style
To anyone who has played JSRF, this is quite self-explanatory: the futuristic, slightly dystopian version of Tokyo, the graffiti tagging, the police with their insane weapons, the characters, the music… Every aspect of the game.
Fluid Movement
For me, the biggest feature that differentiates JSRF from its predecessor and tangentially related games (like the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series) is just how fluid the movement is. It doesn’t attempt to simulate reality whatsoever - I mean you can grind up telephone poles and along the wires, shoot flames out the back of your skates - and this is fundamentally embedded in the movement of the character itself. The character is just super fluid and responsive, yet it still manages to feel like you are skating than running around.
I watched a YouTube video recently where the person playing JSRF stated it’s more a platformer than a skating game. And that really made something click in my brain, in my little prototype I’ve been trying to make it feel like the player was skating. But I think I have it wrong, I should focus on making the movement as fun and fluid as possible. The skating is completely irrelevant to a fun game. And if the end result really doesn’t feel like skating, then fine, I can just make it a running type platformer with all the mechanics I want to implement. Running up a half pipe? Let’s do it, as long as it’s fun.
Skating Obstacles
I’m not too keen on the name I’ve used here but this embodies every type of obstacle/element/mechanic (other than basic movement) the player will encounter. The three most common ones would be grinding, wallrides and halfpipes. In fact, I never really liked halfpipes in JSRF, I always found them to be a bit pointless.
Grinding rails in all kinds of crazy directions, chaining wall-rides to climb a 100m tower in a sewer, and the crazy air you are able to get from a half-pipe.
My Third Attempt
So my goal is to take these three components, blend them together and make a game (or a small prototype).
Naturally the first thing I do when I come to creating this is look for a shortcut, something like import jsrf would be nice but it doesn’t exist. We are devoid on content to teach people how to make games like this. There’s no Unity packages, nor tutorials to create games like this.
As I develop this game prototype, I want to write up the maths and pseudocode involved so it can provide the resources to allow other people to do this (and hopefully do it better than me). Together we can usher in the era of the Jet Set Radio Future clones and saturate the industry with more JSRF content than can ever be played in a lifetime. And also it will be useful for when I’m 35 and attempt this again.
Can I promise I will finish the game? No
Can I promise I will finish the prototype? No
Can I promise I will finish the tutorials? No
For example, halfpipes. These are the biggest hurdle I have to implement. I have a vague idea, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for weeks on-and-off.
I have a rough structure for the next few posts on this, but all subject to change. I really want to start with developing fluid player movement as that is the real basis for the prototype. Two problems: I have a feeling the movement will be something that is constantly refined as I develop, and secondly I don’t have access to Windows so there are lots of the games I’ve mentioned at the start I want to research how the movement works to implement it myself.
Butterflies is the only one I’ve found with a working Mac port. Merci beaucoup Le Capitaine!
Anyway, let’s see what happens with this…