When we sat down to chat with Chris Bullock, lead animator on open-world roguelike Hyper Light Breaker at developer Heart Machine, nobody had beaten its GDC demo yet. The show's recent demo was an exciting up-close look at what's quickly become my personal most-anticipated open-world game of the year, and Bullock's comments on some of the game's nitty-gritty details have only deepened my suspicion that it could be the biggest roguelike of 2024 in more ways than one.
"Don't forget your passive abilities," Bullock says, sharing tips for new players. "In this demo, use the colors to kind of match those up. Those will help. The designers kind of color-coded them to get more synergistic builds. It does offer depth though. Players who want to delve deep and start mixing and matching some of those colors to find an even more synergistic build, you can dive down into that." Hello, it's me, the sort of player who wants to dive down into that.
"But also making use of all the abilities," he continues. "There's two active [abilities] and an Amp as well, which is kind of your ultimate. Just making use of the whole kit. In the demo, you don't really have the time to really learn all of the attack patterns and everything. But you know, hopefully when you get to the full game, as an animator hopefully the attack animations read well enough that you can time your parry just right."
Hyper Light Breaker's boss fights have been another key focal point alongside its procedurally generated open world. Meanwhile, its star Breakers have frequently been pictured with a hoverboard – or, in the air, a glider – an inherently stylish method of getting around that's apparently a special challenge to design.
"It's got its own challenges," Bullock says of the hoverboard. "We've gone through iterations trying to figure out, OK, how do we get onto the hoverboard? What is the process of going from your run into that, making that transition? What are the button combinations? Getting it to move and feel good once you're on it. It's a challenge, but all of game development is a challenge, and it's rewarding when you hear people say that's one of the features that they're looking forward to in the game."
How do you make a hoverboard feel good? "That's a good question!" Bullock says. "Hopefully we're figuring it out. It's gonna take a combination. It's not something we ourselves can only handle on the animation side, but also on the engineering side. So having that iteration with engineering and design, you know, how fast is it going? Do we make the animation really aggressive? And if we make it too aggressive, where it looks like you're trudging through mud or hoverboarding through mud, that feels too slow for the effort that the player's putting into it. Or the opposite problem, where we had an iteration where we went really chill with a longboarding sort of stance, really relaxed motion on it. And we determined that was a little too chill.
"So, trying to strike that right balance of, what is the posing that feels right for this to really get it to work? And trying to get it all to work with the turning rate and everything so that we kind of edge up as you turn.
"Obviously there's games that have been completely dedicated to this sort of thing with skating and surfing and snowboarding," he adds, alluding to dedicated sports games with similar, less sci-fi movement. "It's certainly something that we could probably spend a whole lot of our dev time on, this one feature alone."
Hyper Light Breaker is due to launch in early access later this year with three-player co-op.
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