Why every stick is a leg

Most ski games give you one stick that steers. Push left, go left. It works, and it's how almost every racing game has worked for thirty years. But it's not how skiing feels.

Skiing is two legs

When you ski, your legs do different jobs. In a turn the outside leg is long and loaded, the inside leg folds up, and both knees roll the skis onto their edges. Good skiers can carve on one ski; beginners push one ski out into a snowplough. All of that happens below the waist, and all of it is about two separate legs.

So in Ski Bums, the left stick is your left leg and the right stick is your right leg.

• Push a stick sideways and that ski rolls onto its edge and carves round on its sidecut.
• Push a stick forward and you press through that boot: more pressure, a tighter turn, more grip.
• The triggers lean your upper body into the turn; squeeze both to tuck.

Nothing is animated for you. The carve, the skid, the snowplough when both sticks point in at low speed, the wipeout when you over-edge on ice: they all come out of the physics.

The hard part

Giving each leg to a stick only works if the skier underneath behaves like a real one. So the body does what good technique says it should: it inclines into the turn from the real sideways force, the inside leg folds and the outside leg extends, and the stance stays forward over the boots without you having to think about it. An edge holds until the snow gives way, then lets go, differently on every snow.

It took a lot of tuning (more than once the sticks were simply too twitchy to ski with) and it still gets tuned after every playtest.

Not for you? That's fine

Two Legs is the heart of the game, but it isn't the only way to play. There are two more controller schemes, Classic (one stick steers, like other ski games) and Pedals (the triggers are your feet), and three touch and tilt schemes for phones. We'll cover them all in a later post. Same physics, same snow, same race.