HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER
How one man’s struggle informed the development of a modern classic
For once, we’re rather lost for words. As we prepare to wind up our conversation with
Alex Preston, we ask him what he’s currently up to. “We’re certainly working on things at this point,” he begins, before pausing. “I can’t stop working,” he continues, laughing mirthlessly. “If I stop working, I die.”
Such is the stark reality of Preston’s existence. Born with congenital heart disease, he has been hospitalised numerous times. Before Hyper Light
Drifter, he’d used art and film to channel his experiences with ill health; increasingly frustrated with his condition, he began to dabble in games and found a new outlet with which to express his feelings. “I didn’t start to get really serious until the beginning of 2014, when I started to work with Beau Blyth,” he tells us. “He knew Game Maker and talked me through it, and it ended up being a good relationship.”
The two decided to work on an idea of Preston’s, and began prototyping. They soon began to discuss funding options for the project, and with Kickstarter then at the peak of its popularity, crowdfunding seemed like the most viable avenue. “If I had a good enough pitch, the skill and talented people to back it up, and some reasonable goals here, it seemed like I could actually make this a reality,” Preston recalls. In the meantime, through a friend of a friend he got in touch with Rich ‘Disasterpeace’ Vreeland, a composer whose past work includes the Fez soundtrack, and asked if he would be interested in scoring the game. “It was pretty straightforward. I showed him what we had with the concepts, and the really rough first draft of the Kickstarter and he just said, ‘Sure.‘”
Preston’s years as a freelancer, working in a range of different mediums with a variety of artists, had given him the experience he needed to assemble a trailer for the campaign. “When it comes to commercial work, you learn how to pitch to an audience,” he says. Still, the process took several months, as Preston built the assets for the vignettes shown in the teaser, polished them to a fine sheen, and assembled them to form a kind of narrative progression. “It has to build to something exciting that gets people interested,” he says.
People were interested – and then some. Preston’s modest goal of $27,000 was reached within a day. A few days later it had quadrupled its target; by the end of the campaign, it had raised over $640,000, with each of its stretch goals met and surpassed. Preston’s health had conditioned him to consider contingency plans, and he had already braced for meeting and perhaps just exceeding his initial goal. But this? “No, I wasn’t really prepared for that at all,” he admits. “I mean, I believed in it, and thought maybe in my wildest dreams we could make, like, triple or quadruple the goal.”
He and Blyth had discussed ideas that Preston had previously only considered for the “wildest fantasy outcome”, but now they were better placed to make the game they always wanted Hyper Light Drifter to be. More money meant more staff: Preston spoke to friends and acquaintances to recruit a handful of full-timers to form a core team, including designers Teddy Dief and Casey Hunt, and sound designer Akash Thakkar. Animator Sean Ward came to Preston’s attention in less conventional fashion. “He was just a fan of the Kickstarter who posted a really sweet GIF,” he explains. “We ended up talking and doing some freelance together, and then I brought him on full-time and he moved down to LA to work on the project. That was just by chance, really – the chaos of the universe brought us together.”
In turn, greater ambitions meant more time was needed, and a planned six-to-eight-month development schedule for the original core game became a two-year proposition. But in 2015 it became apparent that Preston and his team would need longer to reach the quality threshold they were hoping to hit. “It was due to a lot of factors,” he says. “It was us figuring things out because it was our first game as a team together. It was my first game, so I was working out how to manage and cope with all the different factors of development, along with running the studio and everything like that. It was a lot of design things that we wanted to streamline, and perfect, and get to a certain standard.”
And, of course,
the added stress of satisfying an unexpected volume of backers. At a certain point, Preston decided there was little point in setting new dates only to delay it further:
Hyper Light Drifter would be done when it was done. “We wanted to give ourselves the time to do it and not kill ourselves over something that we were ultimately unsatisfied with.” He means that literally. “I had to give myself a little bit of time here and there for some rest and healing and treatments. All of that made it into the scheduling decisions we took.”
Hyper Light Drifter’s sound design and score establish a darkly elegiac mood, dovetailing so beautifully that it’s a surprise to learn composer Vreeland and Thakkar didn’t work together much until the very end of production. “It was another aspect of the game that was hard to express in words sometimes. Like, ‘I want this clangy clash with a wonk over here, and I want it to feel like your stomach’s sinking’. How do you translate that into sound? But that’s the magical work that Akash did on that stuff,” he laughs. “What really helped Rich at a certain point was having the level progression settled. He was really good about being cognisant of the world that we were building, and designing the sound accordingly in his tracks.”
Refining the game’s combat system was one of the team’s biggest challenges, with Blyth (a fan of twitch platformers) and Preston (a longtime
Street Fighter player) both particularly keen to get it right. “We’re both big on gamefeel,” Preston says, “though it’s a really difficult thing to express in words sometimes, even between people who design it and think about it and program it.” Blyth’s experience working on 2D multiplayer fighting game Samurai Gunn meant he had learned a few things about weight and impact
“IT WAS A LOT OF DESIGN THINGS THAT WE WANTED TO STREAMLINE AND GET TO A CERTAIN STANDARD”