The Making Of…
How an award-winning adventure took an unconventional route to the top
How award-winning adventure
A Short Hike took an unconventional route to the top
Format PC Developer/publisher Adamgryu Origin US Release 2019
Claire’s trip to Hawk Peak Provincial Park is a getaway with a purpose. The protagonist of Adam RobinsonYu’s breakthrough game is there to relax and take her mind off things (and to pay her aunt a visit) but she’s also anticipating an important phone call. Yet the only place she can get reception is at the top of the mountain, and so her pressure-free meandering still has a clearly defined goal. In many ways, Claire’s journey neatly mirrors her creator’s own. In development terms, this really was a short hike – from conception to its original release as a Humble Original it took just four months, and four more for its Steam launch. Yet it was one Robinson-Yu only embarked upon because he, too, needed to take a break – abandoning a climb he’d already started to tackle a smaller, more manageable peak.
It was December 2018 when it all began. At that time, Robinson-Yu had been working on another game for just over a year. Untitled Paper RPG, as it would become known, was a mission to recapture the spirit of the first two Paper Mario games, with the series having strayed further from its roleplaying roots ever since. The popularity of GameCube entry The Thousand-Year Door ensured a groundswell of Internet support, with Robinson-Yu generating enough attention to bring his game to Double Fine’s Day Of The Devs, attracting some publisher interest in the process. Yet something wasn’t quite right. “I never felt like the game was coming together [well enough] that I would be able to commit another two to three years to working on it, which would be the case if I were to work with a publisher,” he tells us.
That was a daunting prospect for a man who dreamed of having the room as an indie developer to experiment with a range of prototypes and ideas. He thought back to a road trip he’d been on earlier that year with some friends, driving down from Canada to visit several national parks in the United States. “I really enjoyed it,” he recalls. “I live in the city, in Toronto, and there’s not a lot of access to that kind of stuff normally. And I remember wondering, ‘Can I capture this same feeling in a videogame?’”
He quickly wrote off the idea of a hiking simulator, but believed that a hiking game could offer something akin to an enjoyable nature walk while providing the player with a sense of accomplishment. But how to achieve it? Initially, Robinson-Yu conceived of a Rollercoaster Tycoon- style game, one where you’d be involved in running a national park. “You’d have this isometric-like distant view and draw paths for people to follow and set up little towns and stuff. But once I started putting the art in the world and I put a little character controller in for this character, I got more attached to the idea of running around and platforming in this area.”
Yet Claire didn’t really become Claire until much later in development. At first, Robinson-Yu says, he was simply tr ying to come up with a cute character to run around the world he was building. “This bird character was easy for me to draw and model, and I also liked that they could fly. That made it fun just to climb on these little mountains that I had sculpted in Unity when I first started working on it, but at that point, I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of character this was.”
This, he says, is typical of his process: he begins a game like a painter starting with a blank canvas, daubing the equivalent of a few simple brushstrokes and letting himself be guided by the art. Sometimes, he says, that takes him in different directions, or prompts fresh trains of thought. “I began thinking that I’d never used inverse kinematics in a game – like where you have feet that directly match the terrain and stuff like that. This initial test with this character was about seeing if I could have their arms actually touch the walls, and their feet correspond to the terrain properly simply because I hadn’t done that kind of thing before.” Once he’d programmed a procedurallygenerated walk – more of a waddle, really – he knew he was onto a winner. “It was funny,” he smiles. “I ended up making it a little more normal for the finished game, but the first impression of [Claire] was this little character with these crazy legs running everywhere.”
By then, Robinson-Yu had already established the game’s distinctive pixelated style. A few years prior he’d taken part in a series of game jams where creators would tr y to make games using the 160x144 pixel resolution of the original Game Boy. Most people inevitably made 2D games with it, but Robinson-Yu saw this as an opportunity to stand out. “There was this extension somebody had made that allowed you to convert a 3D game into the Game Boy’s resolution and colours,” he says. “Things naturally get hard to see when you’re running at such a low resolution, so it was a fun challenge to see how I could make things as clear and visually interesting as possible with so few pixels.” With A Short Hike, he saw an opportunity to do something similar, but this time with a full colour palette. Though it was primarily an aesthetic choice, it was a decision born of pragmatism, too. “It made it easier for me to make assets – when everything’s viewed at a low resolution and from far away, they don’t have to be very detailed for them to give off the impression that I wanted them to make.”
With a look in place, Robinson-Yu began to think about how his game would play. What was the structure? What were the themes? What could the game’s central mechanic be? Hiking alone would not be enough to sustain the player’s interest, he reckoned; he needed to figure out a mechanical or structural hook, or perhaps even a puzzle of some sort. “The climbing aspect in Breath Of The Wild was one of the main inspirations,” he says. “Even without the rest of the game, if you just have that stamina meter and a cliff that you need to get up… I found that on its own to be a really
“IT WAS A FUN CHALLENGE TO SEE HOW I COULD MAKE THINGS CLEAR AND VISUALLY INTERESTING WITH SO FEW PIXELS”
engaging minigame.” He hoped to recapture a similar feeling in a different way – “so it’s not like you’re just walking straight to the top; it’s not brainless, but it’s not hard either” – but perhaps with a little less tension. An element of risk and reward, but nothing that would detract from the otherwise calming ambience of the setting. Something that required some low-level thought, that still provided a sense of accomplishment from reaching the summit.
Hence the feathers. There are 20 of them in all, scattered across the mountain and its surroundings, gained by completing sidequests, or just through thorough exploration. Each one extends Claire’s stamina meter, letting her climb up cliffs or flap her wings to gain extra height while she’s hovering or gliding. It works as a subtle form of gating: when you haven’t got many, you need to figure out routes between incrementally higher spots at which you can rest to restore the gauge. In the mid-game, you don’t have to worry quite so much. But towards the peak, that all changes, as the chilly climate prevents your stamina from regenerating until you find somewhere warmer: a dip in a restorative hot spring does the trick, but making your way safely between these is more challenging.
“I felt like it gave the game a solid structure,” Robinson-Yu says. “I kind of consider the top of the mountain as like the boss of the game, and then the rest is all about prepping for it – tr ying to find as many feathers and learning how the game works. Once I figured that out, that’s when I really felt like, ‘I’ve got a game here.’”
Now he just had to build everything else around it. By January, Robinson-Yu had contacted Humble about making it into a Humble Original, and drew up a formal pitch. The story was just starting to take shape. “I wrote about how the player is like, worrying about something, and they want to take their mind off it. And I guess the thought of getting to the top of the mountain is something that can take them away from their troubles – they can get lost in nature and focus more on what’s going on around them rather than what’s going on in their head.” The finer details, such as the precise nature of Claire’s concerns, came later, emerging organically as Robinson-Yu continued working on the game.
In the meantime, he got in touch with composer Mark Sparling, with whom he’d previously worked on a game jam project. Having grown accustomed to working on his own, Robinson-Yu concedes he was a little nervous as he suggested the approach he wanted for the game’s score. “I think I mentioned Animal Crossing and Firewatch – I wanted it to sound like nature and hiking, but also kind of be cute and cosy at the same time.” In return, Sparling suggested that the music could change dynamically as you pass through different areas of the mountain, introducing additional layers and instruments. There was some further backand-forth, but one of the first pieces Sparling sent was what Robinson-Yu considers the game’s main theme: you hear it near the beginning, and then again, to moving effect, once you reach the summit. “That was the first piece we nailed down, and that set the tone. I’m not a musician, so I have a hard time describing exactly what he did. But at that point, I was just like, ‘Wow, he’s doing a really great job.’”
Though things were progressing well, Robinson-Yu still wasn’t confident that his game would find an audience, let alone resonate with people. Right up until the Humble Original release, he remained uncertain: he was glad of the funding that had given him a dependable revenue for the duration of development, but his expectations were low. “I wasn’t sure this game without combat or without any really well-defined goal or anything like that would excite people,” he admits. “What convinced me to dive in and make this project instead of my RPG in the first place was that it was going to be short. I could at least finish it quickly so I could just get something out. And if people found it a little bit boring, if I’d only spent a few months on it, then it wasn’t a big problem if it didn’t do well.”
Claire’s story ultimately ends on an optimistic note. The thing she was worried about? It turns out everything is going to be fine. And when Robinson-Yu likewise reached his summit, real life imitated art. The response to A Short Hike’s Humble Original release allayed many of his fears; four months later, the reaction to the game’s Steam launch from critics and players alike was overwhelmingly positive. Awards attention followed, with a BAFTA nomination plus a clutch of DICE Awards nods. Then, most gratifyingly of all, came two IGF wins: A Short Hike won the big one – the Seumas McNally Grand Prize – and the public-voted Audience Award.
“I’ve seen so many videogames and movies and books and stuff that have left an impact on me as a person and I’ve always wanted to try to make something that would maybe have some kind of similar effect,” he says. “That was always an artistic goal of mine: whether it’s a game or… anything that I create, that eventually I’ll make something that’s meaningful to people.” How about immediately? He smiles. No doubt Adam Robinson-Yu has more mountains to climb. For now, though, he can look out happily from this vertiginous peak – and the view from the very top looks spectacular.