HoPiKo - Development

What's HoPiKo? Defining the game When people ask you about your game, they normally ask what genre it is. HoPiKo doesn't fit perfectly into the "platforming" genre as you never run, there are, however, lots of platforms. When we’re asked this question, we normally say something like: "HoPiKo is an immensely difficult speed-run platformer set in zero gravity where you will die a lot."The story The world of HoPiKo is all about saving gaming. In the good old days, the HoPiKo lived and worked inside games consoles, making sure the games kept running. All was well, until the evil nanobyte virus spread throughout the world, enslaving the HoPiKo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRSv_8DICG4 You play as the last remaining free HoPiKo, found inside an old discard NES cartridge. Enhanced with your glowing power gloves, you must navigate the infected landscape and punch the virus directly in the face. With each punch, the virus becomes more and more corrupt, until, on the fifth punch it explodes, releasing the captive HoPiKo.

HoPiKo world Each level contains platforms that can be used to traverse the world. As the player progresses through the game, they will be introduced to more and more challenging platforms. Each platform brings a new game mechanic into play that can be used in various ways. The nanobyte virus has also littered the levels with its own platforms, designed to destroy the HoPiKo on touch. These platforms also increase in difficulty as the game progresses. Watch as their eyes follow you around the levels! Prototyping HoPiKo started as all of our games do; a simple idea and a game jam. The initial prototype was very different from the end game. HoPiKo was originally called "Debris", and was a follow-up to our previous game "ALONE...". This very basic "programmer art" sketch shows the astronaut, that was once piloting the out-of-control pod, stranded in a debris field. The player would have to slowly navigate the zero-G environment looking for supplies. While this was fun for a while, Simon, as he always does, asks the very simple question:"Can we make it faster?"

The above gif shows a very early gameplay test as a proof of concept it’s using randomly positions blocks and obstacles. This was a lot more enjoyable to play than the slower version, and when the randomly positioned blocks spawned in the right place, you could get a really skilful feeling run. At this point, it was very obvious that we were going to need some sort of level editor for us both to create and test levels. This was where my awesome programmer art came to use once again! As you can see, the above is possible the greatest UI ever created. This is actually the system we stuck with all the way through development. It's ugly, but does the job. It saves the level data as a json string to an online database. This allows us to create levels anywhere, using the editor on our phones.

Simon and I began making more and more complex levels to test each other. We still didn't fully have the game-loop thought out at this point. Game Loop A problem that took a long time solve was how a player would actually play these levels and progress through the game. We wanted