Wabisabi Games on Creating the Sports Game HYPERyuki: Snowboard Syndicate

HYPERyuki: Snowboard Syndicate immediately evokes memories of games like SSX, Jet Set Radio, and other stylized arcade sports titles. What were the core inspirations behind the project?

HYPERyuki was born from our love for the golden era of late 90s and early 2000s arcade sports games. Titles like SSX, Jet Set Radio, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and 1080° Snowboarding had a huge impact on us growing up. What we loved about those games wasn't realism. It was style, personality, speed, and freedom of expression through movement.

At the same time, we're heavily inspired by anime, Japanese street fashion, music videos, graffiti culture, and Shibuya's visual identity. The goal with HYPERyuki was never to simply recreate those classics, but rather to channel the same energy and excitement we felt playing them as kids.

Arcade snowboarding games were once hugely popular, but the genre has become relatively rare in recent years. Why do you think there's renewed interest in fast-paced, style-focused sports games now?

For a long time, sports games leaned heavily toward realism and simulation. While there's absolutely an audience for that, we think many players have started craving games that prioritize a more arcade experience with a heavy focus on expression, creativity, and pure fun.

There's also a generation of players and developers who grew up during the PS1, Dreamcast, and PS2 eras, and those arcade-style experiences left a huge mark on them. You can see that nostalgia is influencing modern games across many genres. But beyond nostalgia, we think players genuinely miss games that are immediately exciting to control and visually memorable.

Modern audiences are also much more receptive to stylized experiences now. Games with strong visual identities and highly expressive movement systems tend to create passionate communities online because they’re fun both to play and to watch.

The game combines racing, trick systems, exploration, and multiplayer into one package. How did the team approach balancing those different gameplay pillars?

One of our biggest goals early on was making sure all systems reinforced the same core fantasy: feeling cool while snowboarding at extremely high speeds. Because of that, movement became the foundation for everything else. Racing works because traversal feels satisfying. Exploration works because moving through the world is fun on its own.

Tricks work because they naturally connect with maintaining momentum and finding optimal lines. A lot of balancing came from simply playing the game constantly as a team and identifying moments where one system interrupted the flow of another.

From an art direction standpoint, HYPERyuki has a very bold anime-inspired aesthetic with vibrant colors and exaggerated character designs. How did the visual identity of the game evolve during development?

The visual direction evolved quite organically. Early prototypes were actually much more grounded visually, but the faster the gameplay became, the more we realized the art style also needed to become louder and more expressive to match the energy of the movement. We started leaning heavily into cel-shading, exaggerated silhouettes, bold color palettes, graffiti-inspired textures, and fashion influences from Japanese street culture and snowboarding brands.

Anime was naturally a huge influence because it communicates motion and personality so effectively. We wanted every frame of gameplay to feel dynamic, almost like key art in motion. Over time, we became more confident pushing proportions, effects, typography, UI animation, and environmental storytelling into more stylized territory.

Movement appears to be a huge part of the game’s appeal, especially around maintaining flow and momentum. How did the team approach designing the snowboard physics and traversal systems?

Movement is absolutely the heart of the game. Very early in development, we realized realistic snowboard physics weren't the right fit for the experience we wanted to create. Instead, we focused on responsiveness, readability, and preserving momentum as much as possible.

A huge amount of iteration went into making traversal feel smooth and expressive. We experimented constantly with acceleration curves, landing recovery, drift behavior, air control, slope interactions, and how tricks feed back into speed. One major design philosophy was minimizing friction between the player and the terrain.

We wanted players to feel like they’re improvising routes in real time while maintaining flow, almost like rhythm gameplay mixed with racing. A lot of our favorite moments come from players discovering unintended lines through a course and chaining movement together in ways we never anticipated.

Can you walk us through the pipeline for creating a level – from early blockout and route design to trick placement, exploration paths, and final art polish?

We begin with very rough blockouts focused entirely on speed, readability, and route flow. At that stage, levels are basically giant gray playgrounds where we test whether traversal feels exciting. Once the main downhill flow works, we start layering alternate routes, shortcuts, risk/reward sections, trick opportunities, and exploration spaces.

We spend a lot of time making sure courses feel replayable and support different playstyles. In parallel, the art team begins developing the environment identity around the level's fantasy and location inspiration. That includes architecture, signage, lighting, weather effects, landmarks, and environmental storytelling.

The final polish phase is heavily focused on readability. Because the game moves so fast, visual clarity becomes incredibly important. Effects, props, colors, and set dressing all need to support gameplay instead of distracting from it.

The environments are inspired by locations like Tokyo, Hokkaido, Canada, and Mexico. How did those real-world inspirations influence the atmosphere and visual storytelling of each mountain?

We didn't want the mountains to feel like generic ski resorts. Each location is designed to feel like part of a larger culture and world. We're constantly trying to blend realism with stylization so each course feels memorable and emotionally distinct rather than just functioning as a racetrack.

Tokyo-inspired environments lean heavily into dense cityscapes and urban chaos. Hokkaido-inspired areas focus more on atmosphere, snowfall, winter festivals, cozy architecture, and quieter scenic moments. The Canadian-inspired mountains emphasize scale and wilderness, with huge open spaces and more natural terrain. Meanwhile, the Mexico-inspired environments were our opportunity to go crazy with the thought, "How would it look and feel to have snowboarding in Mexico?" because there isn't any place in the country to do it.

It was a very refreshing activity, bringing warmer color palettes, vibrant street aesthetics, murals, prehispanic references, and a different architectural identity rarely represented in snowboarding games.

From a production standpoint, what tools and engine technologies are most important in supporting the game’s speed, effects-heavy presentation, and multiplayer systems?

The game is developed in UE5, and 3 systems are responsible for the game's feel and speed:

• The physics system: The prototypes were based on a traditional 3rd person controller system. Very quickly, we realized that the system wasn't working as we wanted. It severely limited what we wanted to achieve. Our second attempt was to make a completely realistic physics system. That also didn't work well. Realism is not fun at all.  So our third and final attempt was a custom physics engine that blended some of the parts that worked well from the realism, with many modifications and tweaks to make it more stylish and wacky.
• The controller system. Once we had an object moving as desired on a slope, we needed to allow the player to control the object and make it feel satisfying. Here, there was a lot of experimentation with forces and friction, validating the exact amount of force the player can input to slide through a slope, without breaking the gravity forces and expected behavior from a snowboarding game. Also, when jumping, we needed to tweak gravity significantly to allow characters to jump really high, but without moving, feel floaty or unsatisfying.
• The terrain system. Very quickly, we realized that we couldn't use a traditional level design pipeline to create our tracks. The tracks needed to be huge in scale and allow for frictionless flow through the entire course. We ended up using a terrain system, similar to what you can find for making open-world games. But we started building tools on top of it to allow us better precision, especially for controlling slopes, curves, inclinations, terrain bumps, etc. We saw that the traditional terrain systems are not designed for this particular precision, as they focus more on covering large areas for a controller or character that does not get impacted heavily by certain terrain imperfections.

As for art, we have been using UE5 for quite some time now, so we have built several systems and pipelines that allow us to create stylish visuals with it. We know that UE5 has a reputation for making "realistic" graphics, which is partially true, but at the same time, it has all the flexibility for us to create custom tools, shaders, post-process, and particle effects that can create a very stylish art direction.

On the multiplayer front, we are relying a lot on the Epic Games tools built for UE5, based on Fortnite. This is the area where we have less expertise, so we are relying on a pipeline that is heavily validated by many developers around the world.

The game has already drawn comparisons online to titles like Jet Set Radio and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk because of its style and energy. How conscious was the team of that lineage while building the project?

Those comparisons are honestly a huge honor for us. Games like Jet Set Radio are incredibly influential for us because they commit so strongly to their identity. They're not afraid to be loud, stylish, weird, and memorable.

We were definitely aware of that lineage while developing HYPERyuki, especially in terms of creating a cohesive audiovisual identity where movement, music, UI, environments, and character design all reinforce the same mood and energy.

At the same time, we've tried to carve out our own identity (HUGE PUN INTENDED) through the snowboarding focus, multiplayer structure, course design philosophy, and emphasis on momentum-driven traversal.

Anwar Noriega, CEO & Co-Founder at Wabisabi Games

Interview conducted by David Jagneaux