Jesse Zigthor worked at Armature Studio for more than a decade. When its parent company, Meta, shut it down earlier this year, he wasn’t sure what to do.
He thought, maybe, he’d retire at the video game studio, which produced a VR port of Resident Evil 4 and created its own original IP. Zigthor loved the people he worked with and felt respected—if that didn’t change, he wasn’t going anywhere. Instead, he faced unemployment in an uncertain job market.
“I was confident in myself, but it was a little scary,” Zigthor said.
Rather than fully committing to the job-search treadmill, though, Zigthor took a calculated risk. He decided to fulfill a longtime dream, starting his own studio and making his own video game. And it would involve a sport that Zigthor, who’s 36, had discovered and fallen in love with as an adult: skiing.
The ski resort management simulator, now called Ski-E-O!, began as a way for Zigthor to stay busy between job interviews. After a nudge from his wife—she reminded him that he always wanted to run his own company—his side project grew into a full-blown effort with a prospective release date sometime in early November.
“I decided now was the right time. It was never going to be a better time,” Zigthor said.
Falling Damage
With the result, he aims to capture elements of real-world skiing.
For one, skiers will recognize the mountains where they’re building a resort. While Zigthor has some help from a friend and has contracted out some of the work for Ski-E-O!, it’s largely a bootstrapped project funded by him and his wife. Because of that, he realized it might be too time-consuming to sculpt out unique mountains for players to choose from. He researched and found an alternative: publicly available LiDAR data of notable peaks.
Zigthor brought those maps into the digital world, so you’ll find mountains like Mount Judah and Mount Mansfield in Ski-E-O!. The former is, of course, home to Sugar Bowl, California—one of Zigthor’s favorite spots (it didn’t take long for Sugar Bowl to notice).
The mountains aren’t just set dressing. Zigthor said that he also wanted to include one of the most important parts of skiing: chasing powder. Each mountain and region has its own weather, which varies day to day.
The Sierra Nevada region sees big, if inconsistent, dumps. Utah gets reliable, light snow, making it one of the easiest places to run a ski resort. Out East, you might need to rely on another feature of Ski-E-O! more often, snow guns. Just like real life, the slope aspect adds a wrinkle you’ll plan around, with north-facing runs holding snow better. Skier traffic begins to cut up runs during powder days thanks to the “GPU-simulated snowpack.” Groomers can later smooth out the bumps at night.
Falling Damage
Visitors’ tastes vary, too.
“Powderhounds, they show up, they chase the powder, and then they leave,” said Zigthor. “That’s their thing.”
Jerrys, on the other hand, have a habit of trying runs they aren’t ready for and hurting themselves, which keeps the ski patrollers busy. Another example Zigthor offered: an all-too-common part of the ski resort experience, après fiends. Keeping those party animals and everyone else happy is part of Ski-E-O!’s challenge.
Zigthor plans to release the game in early access on Steam, meaning players can buy and start playing a work-in-progress version that will get more features over time. One improvement Zigthor’s adding is terrain parks. Another, which fans asked for but came as a bit of surprise to him, was parking lots.
“It’s so funny because that doesn’t sound thrilling,” said Zigthor. But, he added, “that’s a big part of running a ski resort, managing the parking, hiring buses.”
Zigthor didn’t grow up around all this ski resort business. He’s from Texas. He saw snow but didn’t really experience winter until he visited Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with some friends. He remembered incredulously asking his wife if the snow “stacks up like this.”
“My wife was like, Yeah, Jesse. Yeah, it does stack up like this,” he said, chuckling.
Zigthor caught the ski bug and decided he wanted to get as good at skiing as he could. He also admitted he doesn’t like being bad at things, which motivated him. He spent the following year skiing around South Lake Tahoe and, more recently, he and his wife bought a small cabin near Sugar Bowl, which has been their spot ever since.
This newer passion, alongside Zigthor’s long-running interest in game development, powers Ski-E-O. He hopes the upcoming launch goes well and that, rather than find an employer, he can keep running his fledgling studio, which he called Falling Damage—a name he first came up with while playing World of Warcraft with his friends at the time as a teenager.
“That’s my goal,” he said. “That this is my job.”
