Modders built Skater XL's maps, gear and multiplayer before the studio did. Easy Day Studios then hired some of them and folded their work into the official game.
Skater XL entered early access in December 2018 as a Unity game with a physics-driven board and little else, so players filled in the rest. Within days there were mods on GitHub: DanielKIWI’s replay and session tools, then blendermf’s XLShredLoader on Unity Mod Manager. In July 2019 silentbaws shipped XLMultiplayer, and players skated together for almost two years before an official mode existed. Map makers built parks and street spots in Unity and passed them around Discord, using templates such as billowper’s Bills Tools and, later, the community mapping wiki.
The studio leans in
Easy Day Studios embraced the scene more fully than most. Before 1.0, it announced that three of the most popular community maps would ship in the game: Jean-Olive’s “Streets”, Pactole’s “Hudland” and a map by Theo. It also said it had hired map creator Theo and programmer Kiwi, creator of the replay editor, as official team members. Through the scene, the studio said, it had found people with “a unique blend of both skateboarding and game development knowledge that might have been impossible to find through traditional means.”
The same post pointed out a problem: in Discord, a creator’s “hard work can get buried just days after it’s been launched.” The fix came in update 1.1, a mod.io-powered browser in the main menu on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. Console players could finally get community maps and gear, and the browser passed a million downloads in a single day. Script mods stayed PC-only. Gear makers kept pushing with MCBTay’s XLGearModifier, which adds new meshes to the gear menu.
Official multiplayer
In April 2021 Easy Day opened an official multiplayer beta, and silentbaws retired XLMultiplayer: “With the release of official multiplayer there’s no longer a space for the mod” (README). A DIY Map Editor followed. Easy Day still features community maps by name in the browser, from Yaky’s and FermenterGames’ parks to Brookzee99’s Oshawa Arena, home of the first FakeSkate Open. To start playing, see Custom maps in Skater XL and Session.
The scene exists because these people gave their time, usually for free. If you're missing from this list, or we got your work wrong, fix it on GitHub.
One of the first Skater XL modders. Their repo, created three days after early access, has a replay editor, a session marker manager, grind-to-grind and audio pitch mods.
Easy Day's own patch notes explain how to reactivate Unity Mod Manager mods after an update, and note that the replay mod and map importer are safe to use.
Missing something? This history is open source. Add an event, a person or a correction, with a source, in the source file. Early work is always the least documented, so dates, names and archived links are especially welcome.