Double Stallion Games
Surfpunk
A 3D action-RPG with a fully dynamic, procedural ocean. I led production and rewrote the procedural-generation and water-simulation tech behind it.
Surfpunk began as a side-scroller and, after a hard look at the market, we rebooted it into a 3D top-down action-RPG to widen its potential. I led all of the production. I handled the product strategy including customer discovery interviews and playtesting cadence. As we focused down to a small core team, I also took on a much larger technical role, and developed foundational systems in our deterministic engine.
I rewrote the game's procedural-generation stack to be far more debuggable and expandable, and I wrote the water simulation from scratch: a fully dynamic, procedural wave system with real surfboard hydrodynamics, including wing-like lift and drag, all running fully networked.
About the demo
The browser demo above is illustrative of the work. It models wave travel as an eikonal problem, solving for the arrival time of a wave front across a depth field where waves slow in the shallows and speed up in deep water. Refraction then falls out of the physics for free: swells bend toward the shore, wrap around islands, and converge the way they do at a real point break. The eikonal field is solved on a coarse grid and rendered at high resolution with interpolation, so it stays sharp while running smoothly.
What I owned
- Project financing, including a winning Canada Media Fund application and a number of partner pitches and business development.
- Project go-to-market with marketing partners for announcement.
- Production for the whole project, from planning through delivery
- Playtesting and customer discovery methodology, including regular playtesting cadence.
- Technical direction and foundation work.
- The procedural-generation framework: island variants, water simulation, statistical distributons
- A dynamic water simulation with surfboard hydrodynamics, in a deterministic engine
- The performance work to keep generation and simulation cheap enough for real time
Why it mattered
These foundational systems delivered on the game's promise of introducing surfing as a fun traversal mechanic. They were technical problems that created product value and feature in all the game's trailers.