Alpha 0: eleven days to a rideable mountain
Alpha 0 has one job: prove the riding is fun and hard, with a friend, as fast as possible. Two players on the same mountain over Steam, racing the same run from a synced countdown, and the feel test: carving, popping, spinning and landing all work, every crash has a reason you can name, and after an hour you’re measurably faster than in minute one.
Here’s how the first eleven days went. About 500 commits so far.
8 October: the spec
It started as a design spec. A hard, grounded snowboarding game: Steep’s difficulty (“snow dark souls”) and Pro Boarder’s racing, driven by realistic board physics. Snowboards only. Social play mixes async and live, with no servers we run: Steam handles lobbies, relays, leaderboards and cloud saves.
The same day brought the C++ terrain core (a bilinear heightfield, normals and snow lookups) and the tuning panel the physics has been dialled in with ever since.
15–16 October: falling down properly
Crashes became a real flow: G-force, edge catches and obstacle hits throw the rider into a ragdoll, the camera holds on the crash, and you respawn at the last checkpoint with the board damage kept. Linked turns got fixed. The edge now limits grip by its angle, so pushing too hard gives a wider arc instead of an impossible 3 g.
Steam came in on the 16th: lobbies, invites and relayed peer-to-peer through GodotSteam.
17 October: the big day
170 commits. The look switched from low-poly to realistic. The course got dressed with piste poles, safety nets, gate panels and the start and finish arches. An art-review loop tuned the light. Walk mode lets you step off and strap back in. Screenshot mode got a leashed free camera with depth of field. And the snow started remembering: tracks stay in the snow, and online everyone shares them.
18 October: a real mountain, bots and events
The mountain grew from a 4 km square to the full Verbier–Mont Fort–Siviez massif: 12.3 km of swissALTI3D at 2 m, 2,600 m of relief, half a million trees, streamed so the size barely costs anything to load.
Bots arrived with a rule: no rubber-banding. Each bot rides a fixed plan, optimised offline into a pro line, then calibrated to Easy, Medium and Hard across six named riders. On the Classic Downhill the pro line runs it in under two minutes.
Then live events. Every day the daily race moves to one of seven zones on the mountain, and every week the featured course moves. It’s all computed from the UTC date, so every copy of the game agrees with no server. That schedule is what runs on this site’s schedule page, ported line for line and checked against the game’s own output.
What’s next
- The Steam playtest, with a leaderboard for every event
- Ghosts on the boards: race the best run of the day
- Park features that move with the events
- Longer featured courses on the wider mountain
Follow along here. The route maps show every course so far.