Hyperlight Drifter is the definition of an Indie Darling textbook. The Heart Machine debut, propelled by a highly successful kickstarter, has become an instant classic. The team followed Drifter and pulled up Solar Ash. Then came earlier this year Hyper Light Breaker. Extracted roguelike had a divisive launch, but the latest update heart machine makes the game a whole new pass. There were a lot of changes that were shaking it, so I sat down with one of the game’s developers for an exclusive interview to analyze where Breaker is, where it is now, and what the future holds.
When the Heart Machine fired a Hyperlight Breaker, it was filled with a very complicated response. Our own Nat Smith said the breaker had a disrupted co-op, a dull intro and a fragmented gameplay loop in early access reviews, but this didn’t mean there wasn’t “many promises” under the noise. Since the start of early access on Steam, Heart Machine has been working hard to reshape the extracted Roguelike game. The Redemption arc starts with the latest updates.
While many hyperlight breakers may feel similar to how they were before, what’s buried beneath is an update full of changes. There are robust tutorials, a transition to a more traditional roguelike structure, and changes to characters and vendors. The Heart Machine relocated the breakers midway through early access and when I asked the team how daunting this was, I got a candid response.
“In a nutshell, it’s very,” Michael Clark, lead producer of Heart Machine, told me. “The burial of the update below was due to some degree to which almost every system in the game had to be changed and all the elements of the game had to be rebalanced, as almost every part of the game had to be cut out and rewired together around some new core concepts.”
Instead of playing like extracts like extracts, just like they did at launch, the team repositioned the hyperlight breakers, feeling like an entry in the traditional genre. Much of the original DNA of the breaker remains intact, but your instantaneous experience is very different from the moments you once had. With so much vocal feedback from players, I wanted to know exactly why The Heart Machine has committed to change.
“When you’re making something new, you have to experiment and push it into an unfamiliar space,” explains Clark. “Breakers have always been marketed as open world log-elites, and extracts have been added to the game to do the job.
“We didn’t do this shift because of player feedback, but player feedback validated this shift,” Clark said of the update below. “We felt this would be a stronger foundation for the final V1.0 game, so we began this change shortly after the release of Early Access to test that hypothesis, and in February we reverted the experimental branch back to someone who was enough to read the patch notes fully. This is the right choice for the game.”
Whether you’re a new player or an older player, your breaker experience since the buried update will start with a new onboarding tutorial. You’ll be thrown into guided levels that will help you see the introcinematic and understand the core mechanics. This wasn’t a breaker at launch, so I asked the Heart Machine what game-changing changes led to the introduction.
“We saw it on social channels, steam reviews, external playtests. If we stuck to the game for a few hours, they loved it, but if they didn’t, they were frustrated and often confused by it,” says Clark. “Since launching, there has been a series of tutorial cards that provide a lot of information about players at the start of the game, but in reality, no one will read them. make You learn that, right? The card pops up and hits the button to close it and proceed. I saw this internally. Someone from the developer team immediately closed the tutorial card and playedtested it, then “Did you delete the tutorial card?” one of them worked on the tutorial card that had just been closed.
“We originally planned to create a robust ‘on-hand’ tutorial that approached the hit of version 1.0. But it was the right time to go deeper into teaching people how to play the game between that feedback and with some major changes. ”
It is important to note that since all these changes are in mind with the Hyperlight Breaker, we don’t feel like the Heart Machine is doing anything differently. This is the way I really admire because the breaker team accepts what they learned from the initial feedback rather than completely dismiss it.
“No,” says Clark. “I don’t change anything in the direction. If I don’t try to innovate, I can’t take any risks and learn anything. I chose early access because I was able to innovate and explore new design spaces.
“We might have made it safer and less interesting, and maybe it was okay? Has it worked out in the last few years for a ‘too risky’ game? But we’re not doing what we’re doing now, and we don’t know what we know now. ”
Buried underneath could have changed how the Heart Machine approaches the rest of the Hyperlight Breakers, but that doesn’t mean the entire early access roadmap has changed. Instead, Clark ensures that the team has already explained this type of scenario, and that most scenarios will already be explained.
“We always incorporate some ‘flextime’ to chase opportunities and respond to player feedback. Many of these changes have spread across the project, but while most of the top-level features are still part of the plan, the details of them will change,” Clark says. “We look forward to sharing many of these plans with the updated roadmap after the monthly updates for May are released.”
After the initial launch issues of Breaker, it’s very easy to dismiss the game ahead of the final 1.0 release. Today, many games are starting in broken states, so that’s somewhat standard, but so is red. Final Fantasy 14. Cyberpunk 2077. There is no man’s sky. Fallout 76. All of these games rose from the ashes that were bothered to become something else. I believe that hyperlight breakers can take part in them.
