The Wave Arcade project is big on exploration and experimentation.
So with no real game design or game coding experience, I figured it’d be a good idea to create a special, secret retro-inspired video game to accompany everything else Wave Arcade has to offer.
Wave Arcade has its name for a few reasons – maybe I’ll touch on that another time, but, the word “arcade” itself certainly evokes images of retro arcade video games and such. There just had to exist a Wave Arcade surfing video game.
I decided to forgo the major mistakes many surf video games make (other than Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer on the PS2, of course – that game brings me some great memories). Too many surf games try to go overly 3D-rendered, ultra-realistic, or whatever it may be. I think a good video game, especially one to be played on a phone, needs to be real simple stupid.
Here’s where the Wave Arcade Pipeline Classic surf game comes in – NES 8-bit/16-bit inspired pixel graphics, simple objective (collect coins, avoid bombs, stay on wave), and spot on classic audio samples from North Shore.
You can get the game for yourself in the App Store.
Making of the Wave Arcade Pipeline Classic Surf Game
Like I stated above, I have no real experience designing games or coding games.
I found an HTML/Javascript based game engine – Phaser 3 – looked through the code of a bunch of different games, read through a whole lot of tutorials, and finally had some sort of sense on what I needed to do to make a game. I just wasn’t exactly clear on how to do it.
The idea started along with the inception of Wave Arcade in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I remember opening up a text editor as I looked outside to a snowy yard, daydreaming of surf. I may have wrote some code, but I don’t think any of those first attempts proved useful.
I tabled the project.
Fast forward almost a year later, and I’m sitting at my computer one night in Encinitas. I had a free weekend and decided I was finally going to make the stupid game.
And that’s all it took! I sat down, hacked code together, scratched my head, drank some whiskey, and out came the Wave Arcade Pipeline Classic.
I put it on the website as a little secret easter egg. I don’t think anyone found it.
I couldn’t figure out how to translate it to an iOS game, so I forgot about it once again.
Fast forward another 6 months or so, and I decided again that I was going to figure it out. That part was much easier – still pretty confusing – but easier than building the game in the first place.
And now, for the price of $0.00, you can play the retro Wave Arcade surf video game on your mobile phone while you do what you do when you play games on your phone. Just remember to wash your hands afterwards.
Available on just iOS for now, but maybe I’ll sit down and figure out Android at some point.
Maybe I’ll make a sequel or expand the game in the future too, who knows? You can let me know what you want.
Enjoy!