Whoever she was, she is now transformed. What does she want?

Why is she here?

And what is the pain behind her howl?

Hyper Light Drifter was a game well-known for its wordless storytelling. A quick Google search will yield dozens of videos and articles discussing the art of worldbuilding without words.

As Jake Theriault artfully describes in his analysis[medium.com] of the opening sequence of Drifter:
“We discover all we need to know about the world in one wordless sequence. And from there on out, all the discovery made by the player is done visually.”

While Hyper Light Breaker will not be entirely devoid of text (there will be UI and some loadout descriptions), we have made the decision to lean back into our strengths and reveal our world and mysteries therein through illustrated vignettes.

There is so much about the Hyper Light universe to discover. With Breaker, we’re excited to share more about the history of the world that led to the events of Drifter.

Our Character Artist, Isaak Ramos, has established a house style for our studio, inspired by the works of Katsuhiro Otomo[characterdesignreferences.com].

Some key aspects include:

• Clearly defined straights and minimal curves
  
• Shading using a halftone pattern (and/or halftone+flat value)

And reasoning includes:

• Effectively receives color blend modes
  
• Meaningfully calls back to our influences and to our past without resorting to pixels
  
• Adds gravity/seriousness
  
• Quickly creates a more finished aesthetic that will support looser lines and different drawing styles

What do you think about this return to wordless storytelling? And our panel art style?
And what’s going on with Dro?

As part of the Triple-i Initiative (#iiishowcase) today, Arc Games and Heart Machine revealed a new trailer giving you a first look at the Flame Wizard, one of the many powerful mini-bosses in Hyper Light Breaker! Prepare to fight an array of deadly enemies, like this one, in Hyper Light Breaker when the open world rogue-lite adventure set in the Hyper Light universe launches in Steam Early Access this summer.

Check out the new Mini-Boss Reveal Trailer below!

To celebrate this new trailer drop and being a part of the Triple-i Initiative, Heart Machine’s previous titles, Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, are on sale NOW! Check out the Triple-i Initiative Steam Sales Page to grab both games on sale via Steam while you have a chance.

More details on Hyper Light Breaker will be revealed in the coming months as the game gets closer to Early Access launch – so stay tuned for updates to come. Be sure to follow Triple-i Initiative’s Twitter/X as well for updates on future showcases.

We're very excited to announce that we are now Arc Games! We're the same team of passionate gamers that brought you many beloved franchises including the Remnant series, Have a Nice Death, Star Trek Online and Neverwinter. And we can’t wait to bring you even more exciting titles like Gigantic: Rampage Edition, Hyper Light Breaker, and more soon-to-be announced games for 2025 and beyond! Follow us @ArcGames and check out the #iiishowcase[iii-initiative.com] April 10th, 10am PDT for a new Hyper Light Breaker trailer!

Follow us on Social Media:
Facebook.com/ArcGames

Youtube.com/@ArcGames

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izqBiM-qzJE

See you at the Midway
https://www.dayofthedevs.com/events/

Day of the Devs returns to its roots in San Francisco for the 2024 In-Person Celebration: San Francisco Edition!

All free with no costs either to developers or attendees. Just ask that you PLEASE RSVP.[www.eventbrite.com]

Creating A Multiplayer Rogue-lite With Endless Open Worlds

We’ve shared extensively about our tech art strategies and proc gen processes in both a recent Heart to Heart with Len White and Christian Sparks as well as on our dev blog[at.tumblr.com]. We’ve also discussed our environment art works in progress in a different Heart to Heart with Will Tate and on our blog[at.tumblr.com] as well.

That was all months ago; often, a few months can mean a lifetime in game development.

Original Vision

Years ago now, when (Alx) was ideating on the design pillars of the game, the question that came to mind was “what would you do in an open world you’d never seed again if you die?”

With that in mind, we made decisions in the early days of our game to try for a more reasonable approach of this idea as we built our systems, since it seemed insurmountable. So, we created an adjacent version, something that captured parts of this design ideal. We had a large, open biomes, but they were segmented in a stage-by-stage format to make it more feasible for us to build.

Over the course of development, we found that, as we continued to build the technology needed for these smaller open-biomes, that we could actually leverage the tools to make the original vision a reality. Thus, we shifted away from the more limiting and (ironically) more complex version of a stage-to-stage progression, and started on a “Pangaea Shift”.

The Shift

Pangaea is used as a code name, as we were essentially merging all of our stages into one larger map to create an open world.

This shift meant that we would mean that we lose some time up front reconfiguring some parts of the game to function in the ne structure, but gain time on the backend and a much more exciting game format to dive into. We were excited and scared, all at once.

This shift yields us:

• Highly differentiated points of interest on a global scale, resulting in entirely new biomes to explore instead of sub-variations of the same biomes
  
• Reduced per-level workload for Houdini, focusing on simpler, bolder biome elements since the context of other biomes being present shifted the dynamics of play so significantly
  
• The ability to generate dynamic, global components that affect the whole run / playthrough, rather than just stage or biome-specific elements, opening up tons of exciting mechanics
  
• A truly open world, procedurally generated, with biomes juxtaposed seamlessly on the same map

An open world you’ll only see once

It’s a thought that leads to a lot of questions and exciting ideas. How much do I explore this world?
How much time do I invest, knowing I could die at any turn? What are the pressures driving me forward in this world? What’s new, exciting, different this time? What’s coming next?

These are all questions we ask and answer for development, and ones we are excited for you all to see the conclusions of for yourselves in Early Access and beyond!

Wrap Up

What do you think of our process shift? Share your feedback!

See you next time, Breakers!

-The Heart Machine Team

Check out our latest stream about our production process behind Hyper Light Breaker, with Senior Producer Lesley Mathieson.

Some takeaways from the December 9th Heart to Heart stream:

• Our approach to production tools and process has ever been “I want people to feel it's pretty to use, it's obvious, and they don't have to think about it too much.” - Lesley Mathieson.
  
• “The least amount of friction is the most important thing when it comes to getting people to use tools consistently. Even if it's a janky system, what we really need is for people to consistently look at what's going on.” - Alx Preston
  
• Some of the tools we use are:
  
• Tom’s Planner[www.tomsplanner.com], an online Gantt chart maker
  
• HacknPlan[hacknplan.com], a game design project management tool
  
• MantisHub[mantishub.com], a bug and issue tracker

Our wonderful Lead Animator, Chris Bullock, shares some in-depth info on our animation process and what’s involved in getting our Leaper to this point:

What is Rigging?

Rigging is the process by which we take a 3D model and give it the ability to deform over time.

Most often this is done by giving it a virtual skeleton (or armature in sculpture terminology), and then attaching controls that allow the animators to move the skeleton, almost like strings on a marionette. But now there are also other techniques that have been used in Film, TV, and Commercial work for years that are starting to make their way to games. For example: Blendshape deformations are where the 3D model’s deformation is sculpted manually, then blended between the base model and the Blendshape(s).

The Bone Rig / Skeleton Hierarchy

Figure 1: Here, we can see the character mesh’s points (vertices) in magenta, edges in dark blue, and then the polygons shaded in gray.

As we can see, here, a character’s mesh is made up of a series of points (a.k.a. vertices) as the fundamental building blocks (magenta dots in above image), along with edges that connect the points, which are then filled-in with polygons. By adding a hierarchy of special objects called “bones” (or “joints” as they are, technically, more accurately called in some software packages) that often roughly resemble an actual skeleton for the character or creature, we’re able to get the model to deform and animate without having to move every single point on the model by hand every frame of an animation. It’s easier to move a few dozen to a few hundred bones on the character than it is to animate tens-of-thousands to millions of points on the mesh.

In order to do this, we need to tell each point on the model which bones it should inherit its movement from, and how much influence each bone has on that vertex. There’s a lot of math that goes into how these transformations are actually carried out, but fortunately, we have tools at our disposal that we don’t need to assign all of this data one point at a time, which actually makes this “skinning” process more of an artistic process than a technical one—defining which parts of the model move together, to give it more of a solid feel, and which parts have a “softer”/”fleshier” feel to them.

Figure 2: Here we can see our bone objects in yellow and magenta along with our base mesh.

The Animation Control Rig

To make things even simpler to animate the bones, rigging will often involve adding Animation Controls, which allows animators to manipulate a series or collection of bones together as a single “system”, or to isolate movement of a bone in a non-hierarchical manner, or in a different manner from the way the bone hierarchy was setup (more on this below). The time saved during animation, when multiplied across a team of animators and total number of animations needed, well offsets the extra time it takes to setup this animation control rig.

Currently, this is most often being done in separate software from the game engine: software such as: Blender, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Motionbuilder, Autodesk 3D Studio Max, SideFX Houdini, etc. Game engines, such as Unreal Engine 5, are starting to allow the Animation Control Rig to be created directly inside their own editors.

Figure 3: Here, we can see the animation controls (in blue, red, cyan, magenta, orange, and yellow) along with the base mesh and skeleton.

FK – Forward Kinematics – We use this term when talking about a collection of objects being manipulated in a direct parent-child hierarchical manner. Let’s say we have two objects: Object A and Object B. Let’s say that Object A is Object B’s “parent”, and Object B is Object A’s “child”. This means that whenever Object A is moved, Object B will move along with it, keeping the same offset from Object A as it did from the start. However, when Object B is moved, it has no effect on Object A’s position in the scene. We can see this demonstrated in the video below with the Red chain of bones. You can see how as each object in the chain is selected and manipulated, it only affects the objects below in the hierarchy. This is the way that the character’s skeleton would animate if we had no Animation Control rig. So, moving the hips would mean that we would have to move the limbs the opposite amount if we wanted them to stay planted while the hips move. This is called counter-animating, and is something we will often go through great lengths to avoid doing.

IK – Inverse Kinematics – With body parts such as the arms and the legs, we often find it easier to deal directly with the positioning of the ends of the chain of bones, and want any bones that are between the ends to automatically bend in order to achieve the positional goals of the end bones. This is done through a computation technique known as IK. This is demonstrated with the blue chain of bones in the video, below. Notice how we have two control objects that we manipulate directly, and they indirectly control the chain of bones.

These are just the two most common of the myriad of ways of controlling the way that something animates. The number of ways that objects can be controlled are near limitless, and new techniques are being discovered/invented all the time.

The Game Engine

Once we have our character modeled, rigged, and animated, we need to get all that data into the game engine, somehow. This is done through an export/import process. Typically, the character mesh and skeleton data is exported separately from the animation data. The character’s mesh data and the skeleton (including the skinning relationship) typically get exported together. In our animation source asset files, any animation data is stored on the Animation Controls. However, the only thing that the game engine cares about is the animation that’s applied to the skeleton hierarchy—it does not care about the Animation Control data at all. So, often what happens is that the animation gets “baked” to the skeleton as a part of the export process—i.e. it just sets a keyframe for every bone in the skeleton hierarchy for every frame in the animation timeline. In the game engine, the animation data is then re-applied to the skeleton, which, in turn gets applied to the mesh, which makes our character move, finally!

We’re also able to setup relationships between bones inside the game engine, which allow us to drive the motion of certain bones based on the movement of other bones. In Figure 2, for instance, the bones in magenta are controlled by the bones in yellow. The reason we do this in the game engine, instead of animating them, and then exporting them, is to allow those bones, specifically, to react to the way the character behaves in-game, rather than adhering to prescriptive movement (a.k.a. “canned animation”)—this helps makes everything feel a lot more alive and reactive.

Wrap Up

This covers some of the basics of the rigging process, and why it’s so important in a modern game production pipeline. Without this process, there is no way we would see the quality of deformation and animation in the games we love.

Let us know…

What do you think of the animation / rigging process as a whole? Is it art? Is it math? Does it seem fascinating or boring?

Some highlights from the August 12th Heart to Heart stream:
(thoughtfully compiled by Polare)

• An early animatic of the HLB reveal trailer
  
• Character animations for Hyper Light Breaker and Solar Ash
  
• The sword (being used by the promotional Blu character) is a "base weapon"
  
• Bosses will be big, but not Solar Ash big
  
• Jar Jar Binks (from Star Wars) means a lot to Alx
  
• We are using Autodesk Maya for animation software
  
• In Hyper Light Breaker, the companion floats around with your health bar

Watch this space for a more in-depth blog post on animation, coming soon!

The Northern Realms are brutal. They’re cold and harsh and demanding.

This is a species (nicknamed “Blu”) from the mountainous north, where the roughness of existence leaves them generally well-suited for action and adventure. It’s a natural step for them to become Breakers.

Species, you say?

…now would be a good time to mention that we will have a limited form of CHARACTER CREATION in Hyper Light Breaker!


Originally, we were planning on creating discrete characters for Hyper Light Breaker. This character had a backstory and a somewhat rigid, predetermined personality and play style.

As we continued development however, our animation department advocated that it would both be far more efficient and lend flexibility to the player experience to instead introduce character creation into the game. We converted the character of “Blu” to a species.

As our Animation Lead, Chris Bullock, puts it, “we decided to have one character "archetype", with a single, larger set of animations that could use any combination of weapons, in order to separate the gameplay from the look a little more. The hope was that instead of doing 5 sets of animations, thus requiring one for each character class where each character had a smaller set of animations that they needed, we could reduce animation scope down significantly by sticking with the single archetype.”


They’re sinewy and fierce, careful but playful and fun, and very clever.

Our Character Concept Artist, Isaak Ramos, worked closely with Alx to develop out facial expressions, outfits, looks, and poses for this species.

Take a look at these original concepts from Alx:


Based on Alx’s initial concept art, Isaak makes adjustments and explorations, expanding on the original concepts. He shares a few key components and considerations:

• EXPLORATION: Alx will let me know if he's happy with where his initial sketches are or if he's wanting to explore more directions. In the case of the Leaper[heartmachinez.tumblr.com], for instance, my main objectives were to flesh out the forms since Alx's concept was already on the money. With Blu, there was a solid foundation to jump from, but we still wanted to explore and solve some important elements to the design.
  
• STYLE: With Blu, we wanted to solve the top by going with a biker jacket or trench coat. I tried some poncho-looking garb, something in the direction of Sergio Leone character. Those kinds of wearables present their own technical obstacles, so we shifted to something more manageable. The short biker jacket came about as I shifted to thinking of a character that was more nimble and athletic. Something along the lines of Canti's jacket (FLCL) with a Han Solo mood.
  
• POSES + REFERENCES: As production goes along, the poses become more standard as I get the rad sculpts in from John DeRiggi and Jack Covell (character artists) to draw over. As much as I like figuring out poses, it’s better to draw over the approved proportions for the playable characters to maintain continuity and speed. For NPCs and Humanoid Enemies, my pose reference generally comes from fashion models. For the sketches and gestures, sometimes I'll go in without a reference, or I'll browse my personal library of references that I've gathered over the years. There are so many pose resources out there now. Weapon references range from museum display images to blocking things out in 3d. Outfit references usually come from a 500 hour Pinterest deep dive, ha!
  
• ITERATING: Alx will go over his initial design and lore thoughts with me, so I've always got a good direction to go on from there. The rest of a character's vibe will flesh out in my head as I gather references. Blu's vibe shifted as our design goals called for different references, for instance. My personal view of the character’s attitude shifted from swift and stoic to nimble and determined as we went along. I imagined a blend of Trinity (Matrix) and Driver (Drive) as I worked on the later concepts.
  
• FEEDBACK: We've formed a great pipeline where I can get solid feedback from the character centric departments. Part of that process involves me checking in with John DeRiggi (Lead Character Artist), and he's been a rock for me as we check in daily. Alx and I have always overlapped a good amount with our tastes, so a momentum is always sustained. Feedback from design and animation is always crucial too... it's all a team effort. Every concept is the culmination of good ideas and notes from across the board!

Fascinated by the concept art part of our dev process? Check out our previous piece where John DeRiggi shares our character art process[heartmachinez.tumblr.com]! Or stay tuned for more :)


Are you excited about the shift to character creation?

What do you think of this species and all their varying looks?