![]() I think it can be difficult because it is a lot of responsibility. ![]() Has that been difficult to deal with people who are constantly on your case, or does it keep you motivated?ĪP: I think it’s a little bit of both. TM: What about dealing with the public? Has that been difficult? Because you’ve had to shift your release date back a few times and, you know, obviously since you’re working through Kickstarter, you have accountability to the people who are funding you and to the people who want to play the game. Some of the things in it or aspects of the game are still pretty personal, but the reality is, well, if you’re not sharing and if you’re not opening up to the rest of your team, you’re making the process harder for everybody, so it’s been relatively easy to share the experience with everybody because this project is all of ours now. Once you had other people working on the game, was that a difficult process to open up your art-making to other people, or did it come naturally? Was it a supportive environment?ĪP: I think because I trust the people that I work with, and because this is a project, we are all working on, it was much easier to share that stuff. TM: I think you mentioned in another interview that you said before working on this game, a lot of your art had been kind of personal and you didn’t really share it with other people. TM: Once you had your Kickstarter funded, is that when you brought on additional people to work on your game or did you have them with you before that?ĪP: It was just Beau in the beginning and Rich, he had agreed to do music for it early on but I think, after October it was? Yeah, October, I brought the rest of the team together. We really dug into that because I was convinced that we needed a blocking mechanic in there, but it didn’t really work out and it was for the better, ultimately. We spent a good solid, like, month, really tackling that thing and it just didn’t really work with our game, because it’s fast-paced, and there’s a lot of things happening at once on the screen at times, and your character is very small, and with the amount of enemies having this shield activation just wasn’t gelling with the flow of our combat and the pacing and the style of our game, so I was like, well okay, let’s drop it, let’s kill the shield. TM: Is there anything specific thing that you had thought about implementing that just totally didn’t work out when you actually got to it?ĪP: Uh, we originally had a shield in there way back when, and we got rid of that thing. For the most part, we’ve stuck to the original vision, I would say, all sorts of things happen during development and you figure out better ways and better solutions as you go. I think what happens naturally in games development is you figure out what things on paper don’t really work in the game itself that you’re building, or don’t work as well and so you change it, or you shift it, or you move it to a different point and it kind of evolves into something else or slightly, again, shifts a little bit. TM: Since you’ve been developing the game for several years, has your vision of the game changed over time or have you maintained a pretty consistent focus on that gameplay style throughout?ĪP: I think it’s been relatively consistent. TM: In earlier interviews, you mentioned that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Diablo were your primary inspirations in terms of gameplay, does that sound right? I recently spoke with Alex about Hyper Light Drifter, asking him about what it’s like to work on a game under the microscope of his Kickstarter backers, about the process of sharing his work with a team of developers, and the challenges of designing a game without any text or voiceover. Eventually they settled on Spring of 2016. This bigger budget meant that the team could increase the scope of the project and bring it to more platforms, forcing them to shift the release date around a bit. The game gained a lot of attention back in September of 2013 during its Kickstarter campaign when it blew past its original goal of $27,000, eventually raising a staggering $645,158. Hyper Light Drifter is a gorgeous action-RPG with a fantastical pixel art aesthetic currently in development by Heart Machine, a development studio led by Alex Preston. Editor’s Note: This interview was edited for clarity and length.
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