Alto’s Adventure is launching on February 19th, watch the trailer now
The day is almost here.
After over 2 years, hundreds of emails, thousands of lines of code, and hours upon hours of gameplay revisions, Alto’s Adventure is ready. It’s a mix of emotions for us over here – it almost feels like it’s all been a dream.
Alto’s Adventure has by far been the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked on in my life, and I can’t wait to hear what everyone thinks of it.
With just a few more days to go, please enjoy this trailer we’ve put together for the game:
The trailer features the song "Kolniður" by Jónsi (the guitarist and vocalist for the Icelandic post-rock Sigur Rós). It’s a beautiful song, and we were thrilled when they agreed to license it to us for the trailer. You can buy the song on iTunes here if you enjoyed it.
If you’re a journalist looking to try Alto before it’s available in the App Store, please send me an email – I’d be happy to send you a promo code.
Why did we make this game?
A lot of people have been asking me things like: “Why Alto?”, “Why a snowboarding game?”, and “Don’t you guys make productivity apps?”.
I figured I’d shed a little light on why we decided to make a snowboarding game.
As snowboarders ourselves, we weren’t satisfied with any of the snowboarding games in the App Store. Most of them are cartoony, have bad controls, or are trying too much to be like console games.
We wanted to capture the essence of snowboarding. That feeling of a great flow. Something fluid, fun, and natural feeling. That feeling you get when it’s just you against the mountain, alone in nature.
We also wanted to build something that we ourselves wanted to play. Something fun for for people who snowboard. We spent a lot of time carefully crafting all of the terrain elements, so they worked in harmony with each other. We didn’t want to just stick your typical looking jump here and there and call it a day – we wanted to build terrain that’s fun to ride.
We knew we didn’t want to build a typical mobile experience either – we wanted to create something that was just as enjoyable to look at and listen to as it is to play.
We took a lot of gameplay inspiration from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (we even bought an old PS2 off Kijiji during development so we could relive our childhood experiences). A lot of the art has been influenced by games like Journey and Windosill. Monument Valley helped us stick with our guts and launch the game as a premium title (paid up-front, with no ads or in-app purchases).
There’s a little more to the story, but perhaps I’ll save that for a future blog post.
Now let’s see if I can sleep for the next few days…
Ryan
