Grab Your Key and Learn About Fast-Paced, Lane-Based Skateboard Grinding Game; Skator Gator

ign.com:

If you dig retro reptiles, skateboarding, and fast-paced, bite-sized 'runner-style' grinding gameplay... you have weirdly specific interests... and I have a game you'll love; Skator Gator! As luck would have it, we're giving it away as part of IGN Plus.

Grab a key at the link below and get going, and read on to learn more about the game. Happy skating!

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I sat down with Sundae Month and Weathered Sweater's Ryan Huggins, to talk about Skator Gator and Skator Gator 3D, two games that take a simple idea and take it in very different development and gameplay directions.

Simply put, Skator Gator is an auto-scrolling game where you control a skateboarding alligator who grinds from one side of each roughly 20-second stage to the other, and your job is to avoid hazards by jumping to different pipes that occupy different lanes.

Along the way, you can pick up power-ups like a set of wings that give you extra air time on jumps, a banjo that lets you hit enemies instead of taking damage, and others. Dangers include hot pipes that light you on fire if you stay on them too long, mushrooms that bounce you backwards (causing you to lose all your speed), and enemies that fly or shoot projectiles towards you (just to name a few).

Making a mistake takes you back to the very beginning of the level, and the sheer speed of grinding can make completing stages a challenge, let alone collecting all the eggs in a stage (which is how you unlock new color palettes for the protagonist; Greenjamin).

Inspiration came from a confluence of things. Many of Ryan's friends were into skateboarding, shared a love of Sonic, and a few other things crept in as well. "In college, I was making some prototypes, and I made a cool lane-grinding prototype,"Ryan said."And my friends and I were like, 'this was really