Hyper Light Breaker News

Hey everyone,

We’re so grateful to all the members of the community who have expressed ongoing support and enthusiasm for Hyper Light Breaker’s Steam Early Access launch. After much evaluation and many conversations with our publisher Arc Games, we’ve decided that we need just a little more time to get the gameplay experience polished to our standards.

Therefore, we’re now looking at an Early Access launch date of very early next year.

We don’t want to ship a project, even in Early Access, that we’re not satisfied with on a number of fronts. Especially in the current state of the industry, we need to put as good a foot forward as we can.

As always, we believe in maintaining a sustainable pace of development for our team, which means taking care of the mental and physical health needs of everyone first, rather than burning the team out trying to hit a specific set launch date. This will enable the team to offer better, more responsive support to community feedback during the Early Access period itself.

Trust that we REALLY want to put Breaker out there, and see people engage with a game that we’ve all worked so hard on. However, we also REALLY need to make sure that the core foundational units of the game are as strong as they can be, so that we can build on them during the Early Access period. In the meantime, we are confirmed to be showing Breaker at multiple events to get your feedback as we continue getting Breaker ready for Early Access launch! We’ll have a demo of Breaker at PlayNYC + AnimeNYC in New York City, XOXO in Portland, and Media Indie Exchange in Seattle. We’re also currently planning additional public demos at DreamHack in Atlanta and MAGFest in Maryland. So, if you absolutely can’t wait to get your hands on the game when it launches in Early Access, you can at least catch us out in the wild at these events and give us feedback on how the game is shaping up so far!

Thank you everyone for your continued support of our games and the people who make them.

For the most up-to-date info on Hyper Light Breaker and our other projects, follow us on social media or jump in our Discord.

- Alx Preston, Founder and Creative Director at Heart Machine

There's a kind of zen state that only certain games can get me into, and when I say "certain games" I pretty much just mean FromSoft games. It's the state of bashing your head against a brick wall but kind of enjoying it: Repeatedly hurling yourself on the rocks of that one boss over and over and over, dying every single time but, miraculously, never really getting frustrated...
Read more.

We’re extremely excited to announce that Hyper Light Breaker will launch in Steam Early Access in late summer!

Check out the exclusive Summer Game Fest trailer below to get a glimpse of the Overgrowth, co-op multiplayer gameplay and other never-before-seen footage. We’re counting down the days together with you and can’t wait for you to jump into the game!

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Wishlist now:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1534840/Hyper_Light_Breaker/

[h3]Who was Dro?[/h3]
Whoever she was, she is now transformed. What does she want?


Why is she here?


And what is the pain behind her howl?

[previewyoutube]VIDEO[/previewyoutube]

[h3]A glimpse into our wordless storytelling.[/h3]
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.

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As Jake Theriault artfully describes in his analysis 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.

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
  

[h3]Let us hear from you![/h3]
What do you think about this return to wordless storytelling? And our panel art style?
And what’s going on with Dro?