Wrekless Dev Diaries: How It Plays

By Mike Uy, Creative Director

As expected, we’re receiving a lot of questions about game controls. That’s great. It suggests y’all are excited to skate. It’ll be easier to understand with a controller in your hand, but until we open up our Beta (date TBD) I’ll do my best to break it down.

Remember the boardgame Othello’s claim: “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master.”? Wrekless is like that.  

Whether you complete our very short tutorial or you’re already comfortable with dual-stick skate controls and want to jump right in, you will be doing things in your first session that would take ages to learn in a hardcore skating sim (let alone on a board in real life). 

At its core, the skating in Wrekless is both intuitive and realistic, taking into account all manner of physics, wheel/board collisions, etc. At the same time, we want to help you do what you’re trying to do instead of demanding gifted levels of twitchiness and punishing you for minute imprecisions.

The basic controls will be familiar to many: movement on the left stick, ollies and nollies and most other tricks on the right stick. Grabs on the triggers. Bumpers and face buttons to modify or handle special cases. (Note: final controls subject to change before release.)

To learn and master advanced tricks and string together long combos will require deep and nuanced understanding and practice of the controls. As you learn, you will gain mastery of things you had ignored previously: 

• Positioning and rotating your board midair to land the exact grind you want 

• How to not just maintain your balance on grinds and manuals, but to use the skill to pick up speed around turns 

• How to prolong and maintain Combos 

• How the best tricks and big Combos lead to earning Boosts

As you progress beyond the basics and best the abilities of Olympians and professionals, we made an important decision: Fun > Realism. 

This is a video game. We want to let the cool things happen. That’s where Boost and platform-style Park elements come into play.

Did we need to let you Boost ride on walls and ceilings? Or double jump in mid-air? Or speed Boost while grinding UP a rail on a long winding staircase? No. 

We play the heck out of this game. When trying out impossible moves, we ask ourselves: “Is this realistic?” Nope. “Is it fun enough to keep it in the game anyway?” Absolutely.

Over and over we found we didn’t just want you to be world class skaters. We wanted you to aspire to epic stunts beyond both physics and limits of manageable risk. So we gave you skateboards capable of incredible Boosts and the VFX customizations to go with it. It’s as if Green Lantern made a skateboard for your favorite pro skater to do Scott Pilgrim and NBA Jam “on fire” kind of stuff.

Likewise, once we gave our earliest playtesters (and designers and artists) the building tools to make Parks of all shapes and sizes imaginable, it was immediately obvious that there would be no containing sanity. We added placeable Pickups that give buffs, Pushers to give players extra speed, Elevators to send you upward, cannon-like Launchers to propel skaters in a specific direction, teleportation Portals, and materials like Ice, Lava, and Bouncy surfaces.

How does all this still play like a skate game? Because you’re exploring huge Parks full of spots appropriate to your level while finding other skaters there to collaborate with, learn from, and teach. Between the Parks we’re building and the ones you’re going to build, there will be no end of finding new lines to perfect, tailored to the way you skate.

The line may involve insane jumps between rooftops, grinds across avenues, and riding upside down for half a block. You might also need to dodge obstacles and perform tricks at speeds requiring professional e-sport levels of timing. Yet, the feelings and brain chemicals involved in skating that line repeatedly with friends—for however long it takes to finally land it and record it for posterity—will be the same warm and fuzzy ones you'd get from landing a single kickflip to grind in a hardcore sim or at your local skatepark. In fact, it may provide more of them.

We can’t wait to see what you make of Wrekless. Thanks for asking the important questions. Keep them coming. Until next time… - Mikey Want to get all of the Wrekless news and updates? Be sure to follow us @WreklessGame on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and Youtube. And be sure to Wishlist Wrekless on the Steam and Epic Games Stores.