True Axis, the development team behind the highly entertaining Jet Car Stunts, has just announced their latest project, True Skate. Hard details are still scarce at this point, but we do know that the game will feature realistic physics and touch controls that will make it simple to pull off really impressive tricks.
True Axis, the development team behind the highly entertaining Jet Car Stunts, has just announced their latest project, True Skate. Hard details are still scarce at this point, but we do know that the game will feature realistic physics and touch controls that will make it simple to pull off really impressive tricks.
According to Luke Ryan of True Axis, “The reason I wanted to make this is mostly because I wasn’t happy with any of the skate games I saw and wanted to make one that I wanted to play.” Seems like as good a reason to make a game as any!
The closest competitor to True Skate would likely be Touchgrind, and the developers aren’t shying away from those comparisons. They’re already promising that True Skate will feature more responsive controls than Touchgrind, as well as “a camera angle that lets you see where you’re going,” or so Ryan told the forumites on Touch Arcade. One of the biggest complaints against Touchgrind was that the top-down camera made it really tough to plan lines and see obstacles until it was nearly too late. With that in mind, it seems that True Axis will be aiming for a camera angle more akin to what is found in the console-based Skate series.
Pricing and a potential launch date are still also fuzzy, with the True Axis folks only promising that the game will be “cheap.” The team understands that the app pricing dynamic has changed considerably over the years, so we’re expecting a very small up-front cost with more revenue potential from in-app purchases of skate parks, decks, clothes and so on – but that’s just purely speculation on our part.
The team also isn’t ready to commit to a release date yet because in addition to True Skate they’re also working on Jet Car Stunts 2, so there’s quite a bit of juggling going on in the schedule, but they’re hoping to have it out sometime this year.
Even though the era of skating games seems to have come and gone, it’s still a largely untapped market on mobile devices, so there may yet be an audience there. We’re going to start warming up our fingers now, as you can bet that all those fakies and kickflips are going to require a good deal of manual dexterity.
