Joey Ziolkowski

To any designers thinking about including ice skating in your game: It's a heck of a slippery slope. If you have the time to get it right, though, it can be incredibly fun!

We spent hundreds of hours and hosted dozens of playtests to tune these ice skating mechanics to be just right for Toontown. In our early tests, the results weren't very promising. It was sort of fun if you could reach top speed, but it was difficult to move the way that you wanted to and extremely punishing if you made a wrong move.

We quickly realized that to make skating fun for thiis minigame, we had to live up to these expectations:

The controls need to be simple and intuitive enough for Toons to grasp them within 10 seconds.

Reaching top speed should be easy and satisfying - the skill should come from maintaining it.

Skating should be the primary focus of the game, rather than bogging it down with other actions to juggle.

In the end, we settled on the following rules for Ice Skating:

1. There are two states: Slipping and Skating. When the game begins, Toons are in the Slipping state until they pick up some speed.

2. Pressing the SKATE button (tied to the Toon's jump key) will switch them into the Skating state, and give them a temporary boost in the direction they were facing.

3. Holding the BACK button will put on a break that slows your Toon's skating speed. Toons have greater control over the direction they are facing at slower speeds.

4. If a Toon bumps into a Cog or breaks to a full stop, they will return to the Slipping state. If a Toon is ever back in the Slipping state, they can immediately use their skate boost again without waiting for the cooldown.

It took a lot of hard work, but I love where we ended up. I have bias, of course, but I believe they're some of the most satisfying ice skating controls in any game I've played!