The Sound and Music of 'Hyper Light Drifter' [video]

54 pointsposted 5 days ago
by hyperific
(gdcvault.com)

11 Comments

mccoyb

a day ago

This is a highly impactful game: the pixel art style is haunting, as is the sound design and musical composition -- transitions of the musical composition leads to profoundly interesting moments. As might be well-known, Alx (the lead dev) suffers from heart disease, and the game communicates something of this experience.

Really couldn't recommend it more.

b0rbb

a day ago

Disasterpiece is a fantastic composer. His work on Fez is probably some of my favorite video game soundtrack work on any game ever. I remember hearing that he was working on Hyper Light Drifter when it was on Kickstarter and I was thrilled and while it's not as individually memorable (in my opinion) is still great work.

Fraterkes

a day ago

Disasterpeace has a bunch of breakdowns of his work on his youtube channel. Including a session about his work on Fez. He's a really interesting guy, both artistically and technically very skilled.

egypturnash

a day ago

If you liked HLD this is your reminder that Heart Machine made three other games.

Solar Ash - rail-grinding and schmoovement, with a joyfully colorful visual style and a melancholy story, well worth the ten bucks or so it is on Steam right now

Hyper Light Breaker - free-roaming online roguelike, did not make it out of early access, really not worth the twenty bucks or so it currently is

Possessor(s) - a very pretty and melancholy metroidvania, a great value for the two bucks it's priced at on steam

Last I heard Heart Machine seems to have pretty much evaporated, their bluesky is pretty much nothing but nine-month-old reblogs of their laid-off devs posting their Linkedins. Maybe it will return but I'm not holding my breath.

nielsbot

a day ago

Too bad...

HLD is peak indie dev 16-bit revival arthouse.

I feel like that was all kicked off by "Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery" (followed by "Fez")

jimmydoe

a day ago

my ears are mushrooms, this to me feel the same as fez.

nielsbot

a day ago

It's the same composer: Disasterpeace.

But I think HLD takes his pioneering style (chip tunes but also more and better) to the next level.

The launch trailer is worth watching: https://vimeo.com/806155790

Also, there was a super interesting talk about how they made Hyperlight Drifter using GameMaker. What they built in GameMaker wasn't the game directly, but a game editor. Doing this let them edit and playtest in one very tiny run-edit-play loop.. I argue all games (and even apps) should follow this Smalltalk-y approach.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024062/-Hyper-Light-Drifter-S...