⌛️The Progression of Hoplegs ⏳

All games go through unique journeys on the road to release and I thought it would be fun to share some things that happened during the development of Hoplegs. The first line of code was written while I was livestreaming and I only had a dumb idea in my head about a box that jumped around. I tried something and after a while I ended up with a sequence that looked fun so I grabbed a gif of that and posted it on Twitter before I went to bed. The morning after I noticed it had become my biggest tweet and it just kept growing throughout the next two days. So I decided to keep playing with this idea while I was live streaming.

The two weeks after the first tweet I just kept adding small ideas and adjusting the physics until it felt right. I had a new playable build which I forced my friends to play through every other day so I could see how people interacted with it. It was very new for me to have something feeling good this early and seeing people responding positively.

Throughout development I kept on streaming the process and testing out new ideas based on the feedback from testers and people from the livestream chat. I actually found the wonderful voice that does the narration in the cutscenes and throughout the game from the chat while I was livestreaming. Same for the composer who happened to be in the chat as I was talking about which direction I wanted to try and take the music. I decided to give it a try and see where the collaboration took me and it turned out to be a very good decision since people seem to really like the music and narration.

When Hoplegs was getting closer to being finished, the Steam Next Festival was coming up around the corner. Seeing people play and hearing their thoughts from their experiences was very valuable and helped shape the smaller things in the game as it got closer to entering Early Access.

I’ll have more about the regrets and challenges I faced throughout the project in the upcoming official Post Mortem article about Hoplegs.

See you all next time! /Kevin