Skater XL News

Happy Monday SXL fans! We just released minor update 0.0.4. Here's a rundown of new features and bug fixes that are included

For a walkthrough, check out Nightspeeds' video here, with further description below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diXXujAfQoc
In Air Rotation: In previous builds, when you popped a trick the skater would rotate to be upright in every situation. Now the skater will rotate to the angle of the surface you’ll land on. This is massively helpful when skating quarter pipes or park like environments with lots of banks and ramps, which includes many of the modded maps.

Old Quarter Pipe Rotation:


New Quarter Pipe Rotation:



Old Transfer Rotation:


New Transfer Rotation:



Goofy Board Control Direction (when doing flip tricks): Last update we fixed the board control direction when you are moving the board left or right during ollies only. Now it's fixed for flip tricks as well and the board should move correctly at all times, in all stances.

Goofy Low Ollie Knee Pop: Issues with the knee in the low goofy ollie animation have been fixed.

Old Goofy Low Ollie:


New Goofy Low Ollie:


Wheels: They roll now. 😃

Disclaimer for modded wheel textures: The old wheel texture contained shadows and looked strange when rolling as the shadow would roll with the wheel. With this update we have removed the shadow and custom modded wheel textures should use the new wheel texture as a base going forward.

Max Grind Angle: The max vertical angle you can tweak your board in a grind has been increased a small amount to help with locking into tricks like blunt slides.

Courthouse: Ed has been working his way towards completing the Courthouse map. In this update you'll see improvements to grass and dirt patches.

Old Grass:



New Grass:



Falling While Setup: Previously, there was a bug where if you were falling while setting up for a trick and simultaneously turning, the skater would turn but the board would fall as an unresponsive physics object.

Old Fall When Turning From Setup:



New Fall When Turning From Setup:



Goofy Push Foot Placement: Fixed position of foot when pushing in goofy stance.


Crash Fix: Removed a plugin that was causing crashes for many users.

Mod Disclaimer: As many of you have experienced, downloading game updates will override your custom mesh and texture mods. To re-install these changes you'll need to open the Unity Asset Bundle Extractor and replace your textures and other graphical mods. To re-activate scripted mods like the level importer you simply need to open the Unity Mod Manager and click “Install” once before running the game post update.

Known Issues: With this update, there was introduced a small audio bug when landing which sometimes results in a few extra sounds on impact. This will be fixed in the next update.

Thank you for your continued support. We'll catch you on the next update!

We've just released an update with a few small changes:

1) Pushing off leg angle

We've made some adjustments to assets which makes the front knee bend at a more normal angle when pushing off.

The character animation system tends to fight with inverse kinematics system (which moves and bends the legs to keep the feet on the board), making it a tricky balancing act to get the two to work with each other.

Still not perfect movement, but should help with having to look at the bow-legged pushes all the time while playing for now.

Before fix:


After fix:



2) Courthouse visuals

We've added extra layers of detail to many surfaces in the courthouse including dirt, cracks, scratches, wheel bite marks and debris. We think the level is much closer to a real gritty LA feel with these changes.









There are also puddles and gathered rainwater using Unity's new graphics pipeline's "Screen-Space Reflection". Our lead environment artist Eduardo has a math background and has written technical papers on rendering and lighting, he's a wizard with using new techniques.

We think the new details look pretty cool, what do you think?





3) Leg tweak direction

Fixed bug where during a tweaked Ollie, the legs could move in wrong directions based on stick input.

Before fix:


After fix:


Happy weekend dudes! We'll be in the office making this thing happen as per usual. Hope you get outside for a real skate. Peace!

The EDS Team

Whatup players! We appreciate the calls in the community for updates since our last post and wanted to let you know some of what what has been going on behind the scenes.

January has been a busy month of learning, planning and re-organizing as we reset course for the studio and Skater XL post-launch. First off, Dain our director has been working nonstop on building out the business side of things and preparing to bring on more talent.

A legal restructure of the company is underway to better facilitate growth and bringing on new team members. As anyone that has run a business can attest, there is a ton of time consuming paperwork, meetings and filings that go into this process, but it is a necessary step.

Gameplay lead dev Jon spent a lot of time in January interviewing key modders in the growing mod community to understand the motivations and challenges of those creating content and assisting some in overcoming development roadblocks. It’s been amazing to see how modders and players have been interacting with the game and has shown us a lot about what players find important.

Because many of the mods contain copyrighted and trademarked items, we are still considering if / how modding and modded content can be officially supported and promoted. The content that’s come out so far is so awesome, we’re looking to find ways we can encourage and assist where possible.

We’ve allocated new resources and Jeff our marketing director will be heading up the key channels for interaction with the community moving forward.

Here are the official channels where you can keep up with all new content:
https://www.instagram.com/skater.xl/
https://www.facebook.com/Skater-XL-199597780921060/
https://twitter.com/skater_xl
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpBQRZl7apZt_LQXKgqKQiQ
[email protected]

Twitter, Youtube and Facebook links are now connected in the sidebar on the Steam store page.

We are also adding optional email list sign up which will popup in your default browser next time run run and close the game once the next update is released. Please drop deets here if you’d like news and updates additional to those released through Steam sent to your email.

Eduardo our lead environment artist has been working on some visual improvements to the Courthouse. The extra grit and texture added to the LA environment looks sick, stay tuned for a minor update with these changes shortly.

With many of the immediate business considerations handled and underway, we’re stoked to be moving focus back to deep design work this week. Our UX designer will be out again from Switzerland and on the team full time through this process. Looking forward to digging deep, assessing all our learnings, talking with players and starting to resolve a big picture for moving Skater XL forward.

While we work to resolve some of the bigger questions over the coming months we plan to release a series of smaller updates which add value to the game in its current state. This may include tweaks / improvements to gameplay, graphics & animations. Some of these are already underway and we will update as these are completed and released.

We sincerely appreciate all your support and know that this game wouldn't be what it's become in a few short weeks without the passionate community that has supported it so far. Stay tuned for further updates soon and until then, happy skating!

Some time ago we set out to make the game we suspected skate game fans like us really wanted, one that focused on the core of the experience and would bring the best parts of skateboarding to PC’s everywhere.

We're overwhelmed at the response to the early access release of Skater XL and are stoked to see so many people around the world are digging it. Our early fans helped us reach the slot of #1 upcoming game on Steam out of more than 2,000 games in only two weeks.

The content and mod community that has sprung up is truly amazing. We appreciate the thoughts and feedback from the community so far. We’re taking time to carefully plan and develop next steps for Skater XL.

We're thankful for the opportunity, we couldn't do it without the many fans who have already chosen to back the game in early access.

Thanks for your patience, if we're quiet it's because we're working hard on getting this right and building Skater XL into the best possible full release it can be.

We’re excited for what's to come in 2019 and beyond, thanks for the support and stay tuned!

Hello all,

First of all we really want to thank you all for your support! We could not have come this far without out you!

Secondly, we understand that some of you are having issues with certain controllers. We are working very hard on fixing the issue and believe we have it isolated one particular issue to Playstation controllers. We will continue to work on this fix and will update when the solution is implemented.

For other controllers:
If you are in Steam Big Picture mode check under Settings -> Controller and check ON the Generic Gamepad Configuration. Check OFF the “playstation configuration” and “xbox configuration” check boxes.

If not in Big Picture mode, then go to the top left menu in Steam -> Settings -> Controller -> General Controller Settings and and check check ON the Generic Gamepad Configuration. Check OFF the “playstation configuration” and “xbox configuration” check boxes.

Thanks again and please do not hesitate to contact [email protected] with any issues.