Interview With Kalin About New SkateBOATing Game, WAVE BREAK

Move over skateboards, snowboards and bikes, it is time to do some crazy tricks with a whole boat! That’s right, this is Wave Break. We got a chance to interview Co-Founder of Funktronic Labs, Kalin, about the upcoming title and various information about the differing game modes and unique style.

Let's get right to business, why boats?

It just feels good to drive them around, and with a physics-based water simulation jumping off waves and diving underwater is a fun way to move around. It is a bit surprising to us that it kind of just works as a skateboard!

Was it difficult to create tricks for boats that felt familiar to skaters and yet unique to boats?

Most of the standard skating tricks work pretty well with a boat. Some are adjusted slightly, and our Special tricks are definitely a lot more wild - but if you know the standard skating tricks and grinds you'll find it makes sense.

Along with doing tricks with boats, we are getting guns for deathmatches. I'm all for it, but how did that come about?

We tried out a lot of experiments in the early parts of development, and one of those was “we should try guns.” It turned out to be so much fun that it got rolled up into the rest of the game. It works well as an extra mechanic on top of tricking for more combo points, and it even subtly pushes you around in the air.

Will the fighting be involved with Trick Attack mode? And what happens if a player dies?

Yes there will be fighting! There's not as much weaponry around as a deathmatch though. When you kill a player mid-combo you get an extra combo multiplier. It's hard to pull off, but the rewards are big - for example your combo would be like '(14850 x18) x2'. If you die, you respawn a few seconds later.

Considering that, will tricks help in Deathmatch, and how?

In deathmatch there are gun pickups around but they require cash to purchase. You need to do combos to get that cash to grab the stronger weapon pickups. If you're better at tricking you'll be getting around the map much better for strategic positioning too.

Last thing about the game modes, what is Turf War? And are any of these game modes team based?

Turf War is a team-based zone capture. You build up combo points and land them into a zone. This captures that zone for your team, and NPCs will spawn to defend it, by shooting at opponents who approach the zone. The higher the points dropped on a zone, the better equipped the NPCs will be (rocket launchers!), and the more points that will be added into the zone score. If you land combo points on an enemy zone, it subtracts from the zone score, and the zone will flip over to your side if you exceed the enemy zone score.

I am loving the visuals and style overall, where did the “Miami Vice with cute animals” aesthetic come from?

We just like that general era of the 80s - it's a cool visual style, great music, and crime tv shows from back then were just simple and fun, and didn't take themselves too seriously. The characters were for a short time based on our previous game, Starbear: Taxi but it's long branched off into its own style since then! The aesthetic is super fun to work with art-wise, and the music we have is great to skate around and get into the zone with.

Thank you for all the multiplayer information! Now onto single-player. About how long is the campaign and are there challenges or reasons to go back and play it again? 

The single player is quite challenging - if you're absolutely god-tier you could clear it in an hour or two, but it should take quite a few solid hours to clear all the objectives. You can reset the campaign and play through it again if you want to stack some extra money for cosmetics or stats.

Games take a lot to make and sometimes ideas or things can get lost in production, is there something not included in the game now that you want to include or wish you could include later?

Absolutely: a level editor. We went for really detailed levels with lots of custom art instead of a very 'box on grid' feel, so it doesn't map well to being made in an editor. That said, I still would just love to have one to mess around with different designs! It would be hard to make levels that have the same detail as what we have so far!

Lastly, what part of the game is the team most excited to see the players dive into?

We had some fun making the single player campaign missions, with silly 80s era TV storylines, so I hope people enjoy that, but I really just want to see the high skill players doing mega combos when they figure out all the small subtle tricks that can be used. The current 4 million points high score record is waiting!

We want to thank Kalin for taking the time to talk to us about the game and look forward to its release this summer! It will be first released on Stadia and then come to PC and consoles later.