2016’s Hyper Light Drifter managed to earn numerous awards and Game of the Year nominations thanks to its delightfully vibrant art-design and wonderfully atmospheric world. With its follow-up, Hyper Light Breaker, scheduled to arrive later this Summer via Early Access on PC, fans of its mysterious and enigmatic universe are patiently waiting for more tidbits to pore over.
Fortunately, during Summer Game Fest 2024, Dylan Chaundy from The Nerd Stash had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Hyper Light Breaker‘s Lead Producer, Michael Clark. Before getting into the interview, we’d just like to say a big ‘Thank You’ to Heart Machine for giving us their time to have a chinwag about one of the year’s coolest-looking upcoming games. With that out of the way, let’s get into it!
Hyper Light Breaker Interview With Lead Producer Michael Clark
Editor’s Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dylan Chaundy, Editor at The Nerd Stash: So, straight away I just want to say what I’ve played of the game so far — absolutely awesome! Like, I’m really enjoying it. I’m just going to hit you with a few questions. So, the original Hyper Light Drifter boasted beautiful 2D art and was played from an isometric perspective. With the sequel, you’ve switched things up and you’ve implemented a third-person viewpoint. What was the reasoning behind the shift in perspective? Was the choice discussed internally at Heart Machine, or was it simply a decision that was made early on?
Michael Clark, Lead Producer at Heart Machine: It was a decision that was made early on. We’re not really a sequel. We’re another game in the Hyper Light universe. But you play as as a Breaker. It’s in a different part of the world, earlier than the events in Hyper Light Drifter. And so we really wanted to make a new experience within this space. We’re all passionate gamers. And this was something very early on we wanted to crack, uh, this sort of impossible problem of an open world roguelike, you know, something that people hadn’t really seen.
Getting the feeling of an open world and that vastness and that replayability. That experience there with the replayability of a roguelite, and we’re just big fans of games of all types. I don’t think we’ve made a game that is the same thing that we’ve made before, and I don’t know that we ever will. And this is about making a new experience, something that we wanted to play.
Dylan: Another interesting departure is your pivot from a handcrafted world to more of a roguelike, as you mentioned. What was your thought process behind the move, and did this mechanical change pose any problems during development?
Michael Clark: Yeah. I mean, I think the problems are we literally set out to tackle that impossible problem of how do you capture the vastness of an open world — something that you are meant to experience slowly and over time and become familiar with — with a roguelite, which is traditionally disposable, which is why we’ve shifted to the you have multiple lives, you have multiple moments to experience the same world before it disappears.
And again, it was really just we wanted to make something new. We want to make something we hadn’t seen before. I don’t know that there’s anything like this when we started. I don’t know if there’s anything like this now. You can certainly find — as a bunch of passionate gamers — you can find a lot of influences from a lot of different places within all of our works. But it’s about taking those ingredients and making something new and making something that expresses what we want to make and what we want to play.
Dylan: Hyper Light Drifter wasn’t a wholly single player experience, it did feature a co-op mode. Are you going to be adding a co-op mode into Hyper Light Breaker?
Michael Clark: Yes. Hyper Light Breaker was designed from the ground up to be playable with one to three people. You have to build with co-op in mind if you want to make a really good co-op experience, but we don’t see it as one or the other. It’s really about play it with the people you want to play with, how you want to play it, whether that’s one person, two people, three people. You can very easily join someone else’s game.
So, you know, if your friends are like, hey, we want to play tonight, you can go play. But you also aren’t beholden to their progression. You’re taking your progression with you. So if you if you win in their game, you’re making your progression. You’re taking that back. You’re winning in your game and vice versa. So it’s really about being able to play when you want, how you want.
Dylan: Hyper Light Drifter featured a vivid and colorful world with a very mysterious and enigmatic tone. How will Hyper Light Breaker differentiate itself from its predecessor and what things both tonally and aesthetically, will it share with its forebear?
Michael Clark: Yeah, I think Heart Machine has been all about the vibes. And, in Hyper Light Drifter that’s where it was. We’ve sought to capture that same feeling of a little bit of otherworldliness; something that is strange but familiar. And, we tell our narrative the same way that we tell the narrative in Hyper Light Drifter. It’s entirely visual.
Dylan: Environmental storytelling?
Michael Clark: Yeah. And so there’s there’s a lot of environmental storytelling. Our art team would hate me if I didn’t point out that there’s a ton of details and information and world-building that goes into that. But we don’t want to tell you all of that with words. We don’t tell you all of that up front. Over the course of the game, you’re going to uncover the memories of the Crowns — the bosses of the world — and the Abyss King, and learn who they are and what happened in the Overgrowth. And you’re going to learn that visually through a bunch of beautiful, beautifully illustrated comic panels that you’ll collect over time. Until you learn the secrets of Hyper Light Breaker.
Dylan: Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I noticed that in the demo, actually.
Michael Clark: Yeah, you’ll find pillars in the game that you interact with. They’ll drop fragmented fragments of the memories of the Crowns. Once you’ve assembled a whole vignette, you’re able to decode those and learn about those. And in the full game, there will be dozens of those.
Dylan: Hyper Light Breaker‘s being billed as an extraction roguelike. One important aspect of making a sticky and compelling roguelike is by implementing appealing progression and upgrade systems. How is Hyper Light Breaker going to handle progression upgrades, and will there be any leveling in the game? I did notice some leveling in the game myself, but if you can talk a little bit on that, that’d be great.
Michael Clark: Yeah, so the details of all the various progression systems are going to be something that we’ll have more information when the game comes out. But within a cycle, which is your multiple lives within the same world, you’re progressing your character, you’re getting new gear, you’re making them more powerful, and you’re also earning a variety of different ways to have meta progression beyond that layer in the sort of traditional roguelike sense. And unlocking new characters, unlocking new sitcoms, which are the little computers that flies next to them that gives them different stats and different abilities.
You can think of that as like a class or subclass kind of concept. You’ll be unlocking new player abilities that are intrinsic to all of your characters, leveling up stats, all that. So there’s very traditional roguelike progression elements not featured heavily in this demo because we wanted to keep it focused on the moment-to-moment. And I think most roguelikes — the good roguelikes — have a lot of bookkeeping, inventory management, resource management, figuring out how am I going to progress, what am I going to spend these things on. And we wanted to keep that out of this demo experience. But you’ll have all of that in the full game, and we’ll have more and more of it over the course of Early Access.
Dylan: Hyper Light Breaker will feature its own hoverboard, which is super cool. Were you inspired or influenced by the fluid mobility from other titles like, say, The Pathless? Will you be able to upgrade your hoverboard?
Michael Clark: There are hoverboard upgrades. That is one of those things where we wanted to get something that is unusual, that feels really fluid. There are upgrades. There are Holobites that will modify that as well. In the demo, you also can do tricks. You can also do tricks off of jumps. I don’t know if you experienced that, but yeah, the hoverboard is essential. It’s one of my favorite things in the game because it feels so novel. It feels very fluid. I like to roll up to an enemy group and drift around them and sort of, sort of spin around them until I hop off and have that perfect opening.
Dylan: Awesome. Yeah, it feels really good on the hoverboard. I was really enjoying it. Will you be considering any post-launch DLC or expansions for your game?
Michael Clark: We’re going to be entering Early Access this summer. We’re going to be putting out new content, new updates for that all the time. DLC post version 1.0 stuff is so far in the future. We really want to just focus on what we’re putting out right now and what we do over Early Access and what our fans want to see over Early Access. We’re going to be in Early Access actively engaging with fans. We want to build a game that our fans love as much as we love. So, post post version 1.0 and DLC and future platforms and all that is, uh, is a future, future, future problem for us.
Dylan: Last of all, if you had full creative control over what your team works on next, what would it be? What would be your dream project?
Michael Clark: That’s a… that’s a tough question. Because I think if you asked everyone at Heart Machine, you would get several different answers from everyone. Everyone at Heart Machine, they’re all passionate about games. We have a very indie vibe. We have people who are working on their own little side projects, their own experiments all the time. We’re a multi-project studio now. We just announced Possessors, which is another game we wanted to make. And so I think the answer to that is, if you talk to anyone in the studio, they could give you a laundry list. And what we make next after these projects ultimately comes down to what are we feeling next? What feels most exciting to us?
Dylan: Thank you so much for your time.
Hyper Light Breaker is slated to arrive in Early Access on Steam later this Summer.
