Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression.

But Skate Story takes the genre in a radically different direction.

It has a distinct vaporway vibe and blends fluid skate mechanics with exploration, puzzles,

and an existential narrative about freedom, pain, and obsession.

The game was created by indie developer Sam Eng,

who previously released Zarvot for the Nintendo Switch.

Skate Story launched to critical acclaim and was widely regarded as one of the best games of 2025.

In this episode, Sam joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing

Skate Story. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder who has worked

at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got a start in software development

by creating mods and running servers for Gary's

mod. And game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and

concepts. Sam, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me on.

So to kick us off, let's talk about your journey into game development. How did you become an indie

game developer and what led you to Skate Story today? Yeah, I mean, I think for me, game development was like, I didn't know it was a real thing

that people could do because you play games as a kid and you're like, oh, I like games

and they just kind of appear from the ether.

So I didn't think that it was like a real job.

But then I saw these people making

games online. I remember reading like rock paper shotgun and they would have this weekly roundup of

like free games. And then these were just like indie developers. So I would play some of them.

And then there's this one developer named Incrapareare, or goes by Incripari, that just would make all these games and put them on the website. And I remember seeing some of the source code for some of their games. So I would just kind of download them and, like, tinker with them. And I saw that they were using this like back in the day. They were trying

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