1 year on Steam Early Access

cheapskate first went on Steam Early Access one year ago yesterday on April 1st.

cheapskate has been in live development since day 1 sharing on my blog and later YouTube then later Instagram and TikTok. I decided to put it on Steam Early Access as soon as there was a base playable walking and skateboarding controller and the grind system and balance system, and then combo, and scoring systems (also very experimental peer-to-peer multiplayer).

Though most games use Early Access to preview finished games nowadays, the Early Access program was historically about sharing early development. cheapskate is on Early Access as an early development / in progress game.

Big thanks to everyone who has checked out cheapskate and has had the patience to stick around and see things progress.

I started this as a learning project since I was unemployed and wanted to try a new game engine. I've balanced life and this project as a side hobby since it started. I was spending most of my days job searching and interviewing but the current state of the game industry feels hopeless (worse than I've ever seen it in my 23 years working in games). I took a contract for 4 months last spring/summer and it consumed all my time. After that I decided that looking for jobs was taking too much of my time and returning nothing so that's when I started prioritizing my time to work on cheapskate as much as I can.

I first started making games professionally in 2003 at Neversoft working on Tony Hawk's Underground 2. I continued on Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, Tony Hawk's Project 8, and Tony Hawk's Proving Ground before I moved on to the Guitar Hero franchise as Neversoft changed projects. I worked on an indie Mobile/PC skateboarding game years later called Epic Skater 2 with some former co-workers from Neversoft, but other than that the rest of my game career was mostly shooters and action adventure genres. I've said many times that I'm never as happy as when I'm working on a skateboarding game, so when things looked at their lowest I decided to just spend the time I have making my own skateboarding game.

So that's the story of cheapskate. I like skateboarding and I like making skateboarding games and all the skills and experience that I built up in 'AAA' in the past 2 decades is basically worthless since the industry is a dumpster fire so I'm just still out here making a skateboarding game.

Update & New Community Content

• I've added more "under the hood" work to the story mode systems to get things ready for story missions (also cleaned up the test story cutscene and mission in Level 1, still just a functional test)
• Added 2 new deck graphics from DempC and Ortho
• Added a new community level from Rhys and an anniversary collab level from DempC, Scroolip, and WebGnar

Here's a video showing off some new lines in Level 1 and then playing the new community levels for the first time and reacting.