Denshattack: Designing A New Skateboarding Game Where the Skateboard is A Train

David Jaumandreu, Studio and Game Director, Undercoders

Summary

Explore the creative process behind Denshattack! – an action-packed skateboarding game through a colorful Japanese-inspired dystopia.
Learn more about the influences and challenges behind the practicalities of using a train to do skateboarding tricks.
Denshattack! is out today on XBOX Series XIS, XBOX PC and via XBOX Game Pass.

When we were first pitching Denshattack!, and even when people hear about it today, it’s the core concept that really surprises them. We like to describe it as ‘Tony Hawk but you’re a train’ and they immediately become intrigued by how we came up with the idea.

The very first spark for Denshattack! started with a small Japanese toy train. One day I was absent-mindedly pushing it around, making it jump over imaginary obstacles and ended up putting it on a finger skate. I just had to see if it would work as a game. My colleague Angel thought I was crazy, but we put together a quick prototype and immediately saw that the idea had legs (or rather, rails!). So, we got to work creating something to pitch, and the rest is history.

As the project progressed, we asked ourselves – can a train actually capture the same feeling as a board does in games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and SSX? Because when I think about that great flowstate energy you get by chaining tricks and combos, the magic doesn’t necessarily come from the board itself (Jet Set Radio does this with rollerblading after all). It’s more about the movement and expression it brings, where everything becomes an opportunity to experiment and express your own style. That’s the feeling we wanted to chase.

Games like these were huge inspirations because they all understand the joy of movement. They make you want to replay the same level again and again, because you know you can do it better next time.

In some ways a train is a perfect match for trick gameplay because it already has something you are always looking for: momentum. A skateboarder builds speed, commits to a trick and uses the environment to keep that flow going. A train does the same thing, just with several tons of steel behind it. The railway tracks became our skatepark. Instead of asking players to freely steer everywhere, we wanted them to think about timing, rhythm and creativity.

One of the biggest surprises during development was discovering that applying this system to railway tracks, which could have been a limitation, actually became one of the game’s greatest strengths.

At first, we worried that players might feel restricted by following a set route (more or less). A lot of the freedom of movement and expression I mentioned might not have worked if you take away the skatepark element where you can choose exactly where you want to go and instead put the thing on rails. However, once we started making prototypes, we realised that removing some of that freedom doesn’t make it worse, it just makes it different. It reminded us of games like Sonic, which have this ultra fast-paced energy something like a speeding train would also have. So we in turn took a lot of inspiration from that too. Blending genres like this made the game even better because it became something unique.

Of course, we had a very unusual design problem. How do you make a train do an ollie? Obviously a train should not be able to jump at all. So, every trick needed to balance two completely opposite ideas: the fantasy of doing something impossible, and the satisfying feeling of something incredibly heavy moving through the world. You needed to feel the effort behind it and believe in the idea that this huge machine was somehow forcing itself into the air. The same was true for grinding, which became more about controlling the weight and momentum of an entire locomotive made of tonnes of steel.

Finding that balance took a lot of experimentation. We had to embrace the ridiculousness of the idea while creating rules that made the world feel consistent. That’s what takes the initial bizarre appeal of a train doing tricks to another level, offering deep and satisfying gameplay too.

The story of Denshattack!, where the main character Emi travels across a dystopian Japan battling and befriending those who don’t want to conform and who have been pushed out of society, works similarly. The game became a story about people who found their own way of expressing themselves by taking on this extreme, outlawed sport. The abandoned railway lines in Denshattack! aren’t just places to perform tricks, they’re places that a whole subculture have reclaimed and transformed into their own. We were making a game about using self-expression and creativity to celebrate each others’ differences and come together to face oppression.

That’s probably my favourite thing about Denshattack!. The idea that sounded the most ridiculous at the beginning ended up giving us the opportunity to tell a surprisingly sincere and relatable story. Yes, you can make a train ollie, grind on rails and pull off impossible combos. But underneath all of that is the simple idea that movement is a form of expression, and there’s always room to create something new, even if the vehicle for it is a multi-ton train.

Denshattack! launches today for XBOX Series X|S, XBOX PC and day one via XBOX Game Pass. Also available via XBOX Cloud as an XBOX Play Anywhere title.

Denshattack!

Fireshine Games

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Flip, trick and grind your train in a fast-paced, off-the-rails ride through a colourful Japanese dystopia. Outmatch rival gangs, wreck a shady megacorp, and take back the tracks with nothing but skill, speed, and style. Ollie, kickflip, and grind your way through Japan's biggest cities, as well a world of meadows, volcanoes and oceans. Rack up points and chase that sweet high score as you flip, trick and stick the landing in your customisable ride.