![]() Like, in the hotel room the night before the show. And I remember we were making that demo en route. Alx was exhausted from running the Kickstarter and we were trying to do a ton of work just to figure out what the game could be. “They had reached out to us and we thought this would be a cool opportunity, but also everybody was wrecked. “It was about a month after the Kickstarter,” he says. The first public demo for the game was at MineCon in Orlando, and it was a particularly eye opening experience for Dief, who flew out there on his own. At least to the extent that we’re happy enough to be showcasing.” Mostly it was great for us internally to understand ‘oh yeah, we can make things and we can finish them’. There are so many reasons why it’s extremely helpful and a positive experience overall. You play very differently to how anybody else can play, because you understand the roots and it’s constantly on your mind. “It’s always a new experience when you’re watching somebody play a level that you’ve been designing and you know inside and out. And we know that we have to deliver on this date, so it was super helpful and it was also great to be able to finally show some people and watch them play. “After deciding we were going to head out to PAX, for example, we’d spend time thinking ‘okay we’re going to build out some North here and have this playable chunk ready for the demo,’ and that gives us a set of tasks and a goal. “We treated events as big internal milestones for a deliverable,” says Preston. The team took advantage of the games events circuit to set deadlines and gather valuable playtesting insight at the same time. The team declined to work with a publisher, so with no one setting development tasks for the team, Heart Machine took it upon itself to manage its schedule. They are part of the project and I’m okay with that.” Just the things that we didn’t do better at first, we learned from. It’s not to say that there aren’t things that we could have done better. “Sure, there are plenty of things that, at the time, a tiny insight would be nice to have done them perfectly, or not to have fucked up, but I wouldn’t have learned some lessons otherwise. “I don’t know if I would really change anything about development because a lot of it was such a huge learning experience that was really valuable and I took those lessons to heart,” Preston says. In fact, ‘no regrets’ is a recurring theme when talking to the pair. Although it was not what I was seeking, the timing really worked out.”Īs for Dief’s game? Long dead, but he has no regrets. I was like ‘oh man, this is so beautiful’ and I hooked up with Alx. I was working on a very different type of action RPG. ![]() ![]() It was not at all what I had said I was looking for. So I had emailed all of Glitch City the day of the Hyper Light Drifter Kickstarter launch, asking ‘Hey does anyone know of any short term gigs?’ When Alx reached out the Kickstarter had already started to have really strong momentum. “I had judged that I needed a few months of runway, because it takes time to build those campaigns, to make sure I was financially soluble. “We had founded Glitch City and I was deep in my own indie endeavour and was considering doing a crowdfunding campaign of my own,” Dief says. The majority of the Heart Machine team that worked on Hyper Light Drifter came from this collective and even though Dief was a founding member, it was only through serendipity that he ended up working on the game at all. “We were doing that for a few months and we were always discussing the idea of a co-working space.” “Glitch started for me out of our garage, hosting art events or working nights where we’d invite people over,” he says. Conversation started around whether we had enough people to actually rent a space.”īefore renting an office together, the group worked out of Preston’s house. There was some breaking point where people were getting tired of not having power outlets. “There was a monthly jam called Strawberry Jam that was run out of coffee shops, and that’s how I met a number of other people who ended up coming around the table to start Glitch City. “We would come together as a group of various types of media creators,” Dief says.
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