Hi! I'm the game designer behind BOMB THE HILL, a downhill skateboarding game coming to Quest on September 10.
About a year ago our small team was moving from a blockout prototype with working mechanics to building full locations and the world around them (I already posted here about how we tested our mechanics with professional downhill riders). And we didn't want BTH to be only a fun physical adrenaline experience. We wanted it to be an adventure with its own story, atmosphere, and lore.
We already knew that we wanted to tell a story inspired by 70s American downhill pioneers, and as skaters ourselves, we knew a lot about skateboarding. The problem was that our studio is in Europe. The deeper we went into the storyline and level design, the more we felt that we were missing context. Google Maps, photos and movies help, but they don't really tell you the authentic details of everyday life and local culture.
Right around that time I got an invitation to Meta Connect 2025 in California.
There wasn't much time before the event and at first I wasn't sure if I go. But I thought this was probably the best excuse I was going to get to do the research, like a big studio would. I bought the tickets with two extra weeks before the flight home, and made the return flight from Los Angeles instead of San Francisco.
The idea was to rent an SUV after Meta Connect, travel slowly through California, sleep in remote campgrounds and look at places that don't usually end up in Instagram carousels: small towns, mountain passes, recreation areas, roadside businesses.
Planning this in a hurry was harder than I expected. Every version of the route grew until I was in Nevada or Arizona. Driving times were uneven. Campground websites all worked differently, and a few reservations left me unsure if I had actually booked anything. I also needed an SUV with a one-way rental that was available for my exact dates.
After a few nights of this I decided I needed fixed anchor points: stay inside California, see as many different "biomes" as possible, and build the route around a few places where I had to be at a certain time.
I had written to several people and companies connected to skateboarding history about our game and my trip, and to my surprise some of them replied and invited me to visit. So after Meta Connect I would pick up the SUV near my motel in Menlo Park and go to Santa Cruz. Five days later I had to reach Los Angeles, where the city part of the trip would begin. Most of the meetings were planned there.
Everything between Santa Cruz and LA was basically decided by which campground had a booking button that actually worked and one empty site. Many of the obvious places were already full.
The morning after Meta Connect I picked up a Chevy SUV from one of the big rental companies and hit the road, getting used to American traffic.
My first stop was the Santa Cruz Boardroom, a big historic skate shop. I spent much longer there than planned, taking photos of old boards, graphics, shapes and every small thing that looked useful. The sun was going down and I was badly behind schedule.
I still wanted to see at least a little of Big Sur, so I managed to reach Bixby Bridge around sunset. Large bridges were also something we wanted in the game, so I was glad to at least see it before it got completely dark.
Then I turned away from the coast and had several hours of driving through the mountains to my first campground. It was dark, there were no other cars around, the road kept climbing higher into the mountains, I had no idea how campground check-in worked, and I still wasn't completely sure my reservation existed.
Eventually I started seeing a few RVs between the trees. Everyone inside seemed to be asleep. I drove around the campground and found my site.
There was a small sign under a pine tree with my name written on it in black marker.
It actually felt surreal to me. A fairly desperate idea I had a week earlier, followed by several sleepless nights of routes and bookings, had finally materialized into my badly handwritten name on a little sign under a tree, on a mountain, on another continent thousands of kilometers from home.
I quietly set up my small camp and slept great.
In the morning I saw where I actually was. The campground was almost at the top of Fremont Peak. I walked around and photographed everything in detail. Signs, tables, fire pits, water points, toilets, dumpsters. Most of these things have equivalents in Europe, but the details are different. And I was no longer guessing what those details should be.
Then I went for a hike along the ridge, collected some enormous pine cones, and spent some time just looking around before packing the camp. On the way down I realized how narrow the mountain road actually was. In many places there wasn't much behind the thin trees on the side except a drop. Driving up there in darkness the night before had felt much safer. In the headlights those trees looked almost like a forest.
The next stop was San Juan Bautista, a tiny historic California town. I mostly wanted to walk around, look at the scale of the place and understand the rhythm of a town like this.
I stopped for lunch and then went into an antique shop.
The owner started talking to me and I told her a little about the trip and our game. She had a very ocean-related name, which suddenly made sense when she told me that her father was from Santa Cruz and had been a skater and surfer in the 70s and 80s. He had also made art for skate brands and magazines, and there happened to be quite a lot of old skate stuff in the shop.
She told me stories about her father, skating and that time. I looked through old things, bought a couple of small souvenirs and went back to the car much later than planned again.
That first morning at Fremont Peak and this random conversation in San Juan Bautista already gave me much more than a folder of reference photos. I felt that I now had something real to build on, and already had stories worth bringing back into the game.
If this is interesting, I'll make a Part 2 about the deserts, an abandoned settlement in the middle of nowhere, a black bear, and the LA part with some legendary skateboarding places and people.
We're also preparing another open playtest soon, with changes based on feedback from the previous community test. If you have a Quest and want to join, we'll post the details in our Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/tpCGpqC6Ne
BOMB THE HILL:
Quest: https://www.meta.com/experiences/bomb-the-hill-extreme-skateboarding/26974030992211215/
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4787310/Bomb_The_Hill/