Hyper Light Drifter was a quiet, thoroughly minimalist experience, begging for player interpretation, while Solar Ash is more narratively transparent, with voice acting, a clear timeline, and an explanation of the world’s lore. There’s also been a huge transition in the amount of narrative between the team’s two games. At the end of the day, I can go back and look at the original pitch from five years ago that I was kicking around internally, and look at what we ’ve ended up with at the end of this journey, and it ’s very much in line with what the initial vision was.” And we hope that we ’ve actually achieved that. “We were really trying to execute on this kind of very ambitious scale of game for a team of this size. “The jump to 3D has been a pretty transformative thing for the studio,” Preston says. Both games share a love for mysterious environmental spaces, and massive, Neon Genesis Evangelion–inspired bosses and monstrosities. There are cloud formations you can skate around continuously, and rails you can grind like you’re Tony Hawk on the edge of a dying star. Solar Ash transitions its predecessor ’s world from 2D bespoke, chunky pixelart to clean, large-scale 3D spaces that allow the player to really flow around on their Voidrunner rollerblades. Otherwise, it feels pretty lonely because making games is a really challenging prospect.” It ’s important to other folks to make sure that they maintain connections and have people to talk to and kind of share the trials and tribulations of development. Though less involved with the co-op, Preston stresses the importance of having a community as a games developer: “It ’s important for developers of a certain scale to have that community. “I’ve got my hands full with Heart Machine stuff these days, but I ’m still a member and visitor and it ’s still a healthy community overall.” “I no longer do any of the event planning or anything like that,” Preston says. As a result, the game’s scope expanded greatly, and it eventually released to largely rave reviews.Īfter Hyper Light Drifter’s success, Heart Machine got its own office, which Glitch City also moved into before getting a different space in Koreatown, where it now resides. Its Kickstarter was something of a games crowdfunding phenomenon, bringing in more than $645,000 on a $27,000 goal. Hyper Light Drifter’s development began in the Glitch City space. “We were all independent artists, developers, whatever else, and it made sense to go find some sort of group office space that we could be in together.” “We were all just tired of working out of our houses, and we wanted a space to work in together,” Preston says. Though Heart Machine now has an office in Culver City, creative director Preston’s origins in the industry lie in his co-founding of Los Angeles co-op work space Glitch City around 2012. Los Angeles–based Heart Machine Studios, which previously released Hyper Light Drifter, brought some of their core team to a game that ostensibly takes place in the previous title’s same universe. “And characters that are trying to really break their own cycles of almost self-inflicted pain via the waves of trauma they ’re really still navigating.” “It ’s mostly just about this forsaken space in a lot of ways,” says creative director Alx Preston. Along the way, you learn the stories of various aliens who have lost track of their histories as the entropy of the dying world loosens their memories.Īt a glance, it’s a gamer-y, jargon-heavy mouthful, but developer Heart Machine injects the title with a strong emotional core and thrilling sense of mystery and discovery. You play as Rei, a “Voidrunner” on a dissolving planet near a black hole, who intends to activate the “Starseed” and save your nearby home planet. Say what you want about Solar Ash, it’s likely the world’s first rollerblading sci-fi apocalypse game.
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