Former Nintendo developer Gilles Goddard has begun work on a 1080° Snowboarding spiritual successor. He currently has a prototype build of the game running on Unreal Engine 4.
Talking to Eurogamer, Goddard states that he aims to double down on what made the original 1080° Snowboarding successful. At the same time, he wants to add in ideas that make the most of modern hardware.
“Technology has changed, you can now have 100 players on a single mountain, and they’re all playing each other,” says Goddard. “And you can real-time stream to YouTube – people can start playing with you and then stream with really fast networking and proper multiplayer.”
Aside from the expanded multiplayer, Goddard wants to have a more realistic and fluid snow simulation. “I’m aiming to emulate the snow across an entire mountain – that means overnight snowfalls lays fresh snow,” he explains. “You jump on your snowboard and go down and then compress the snow, and as you turn the snow pushes out and sprays across which then creates a new lump there which other people can then jump on that.”
The prototype build is currently using terrain data from a mountain in Switzerland to test their ideas. Goddard wants in-game mountains to be “normal mountain sized,” which is part of why he’s using real world data.
Of course, the controls are one of the most important things to consider when making a spiritual successor to 1080° Snowboarding.
“1080° Snowboarding, I feel at least, there was so much depth to the control system, things like crouching down to go faster and then you have less control, when you jump and in order to soften the landing if you time the button press right your legs take the impact,” states Goddard. He then mentions how Nintendo developed the original game partly to help show off the Nintendo 64’s analog controller.
“Nintendo games up until that point were left, right, up and down. All the games that come out with the N64 were very much focused on the controller, and that pushed us towards that analogue feel.”
With that said, Nintendo is not involved in Goddard’s 1080° Snowboarding spiritual successor, so the new game can’t use the 1080° name. In light of this, Goddard jokes that they’ll just “call it whatever the next number is.” He continues stating, “actually, 1080° is considered quite an easy trick to do nowadays.”
Here’s hoping that a spiritual successor to 1080° Snowboarding is just as easy to pull off.
