It is wild to me that this is the first time I’m talking about HyperDot on this website. Within the time the website was idle, HyperDot was created, released, nominated, and is being ported to other platforms. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those who don’t know HyperDot is an action arcade game where you dodge everything. You play as a dot, and you need to avoid all the shapes around an arena. There are modifiers that change the way the game is played, so you could be twice as big or twice as fast; or you can change the arena itself like Dark Mode where you can’t see everything around you. There’s local multiplayer so you can play with your friends, or you can create your own levels using the in-game level editor.
To say that HyperDot has been life changing would be an understatement. It has led me to do so many bucket list things. Much like the last blog post, there’s so much to talk about so I will try and keep it relatively tame in scope. I’m also not going to do a whole postmortem; this is more for catching everyone up to speed on the wild ride that is HyperDot and point you off to things I have done around it. I’ll do a deeper dive in all the different aspects of development, publishing, launch, etc. at a later date. But without further ado, links incoming!
The Catalyst
Initially, the game started out as a project for one of my college courses that had nothing to do with video games. I was tasked with making a presentation and I decided, “I’m gonna make a video game!”. I finished the original project within 4 days (might have been due to procrastination heh) then showed it off at a local playtesting event. The response was great! A lot of people really enjoyed the game and I really enjoyed making it. So, I decided to continue working on with the goal of having 100 levels in the game and finishing by the end of summer.
I didn’t.
Sign Sealed Delivered
When I originally started working on HyperDot I was thinking that it was gonna be a small project that I could self-publish. But as time went on there the potential in the game grew and I could tell it would be helpful to get the game out on multiple platforms, more than, at the time, I was comfortable pursuing. Fortunately, I was approached by a longtime friend, Evva Karr who also is the co-founder of GLITCH. They were starting up a publishing label and wanted to feature my game and Tribe.
Now… there’s a lot that I am about to gloss over here in terms of the whole publishing journey, in fact I’m hopping over almost 2 years of things in the interest of time. But if you are interested in the saga that was the GLITCH and Tribe Games partnership, I recommend checking out our podcast series we did outlining what happened. There’s a lot of content so feel free to listen to it in the background if you want.
Conventions Abound
Time to enter what I have dubbed “The Year of Dreams”. I was at a whirlwind of conventions and events all across the industry, the states, and locally. I still can’t believe HyperDot was featured at some of these places like E3 and GDC thanks in large part to GLITCH and our friends at Xbox for taking a chance on us. I’ve been truly fortunate to have gone to all of these places. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a postmortem so I will also gloss over all of the details here including how we got that Xbox partnership and a road trip from Minnesota to Seattle and back, heh. But here are some pictures of some of the various events that I attended that year.
“So, you have a cool idea for a video game”
When I was younger learning about the Game Developers Conference for the first time, I never would have thought that I would speak at the event. I spoke on the phenomenon of constantly starting new projects after slowly losing interest in previous ones. It blows me away that I was able to reach so many people and the response has been wonderful. Thank you everyone for listening to me speak. I really mean that. If you are at all interested in any creative field, I would recommend checking out my talk as it applies to more than just games.
Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough again to be invited by Unity to speak on a panel of awesome developers about designing impactful games. Which whoa, I can’t believe that HyperDot was featured by Unity! A long-standing dream of mine was to be featured by them one day and I was able to make that happen this year! Coincidentally, it is the 10-year anniversary of me switching over to Unity after I started working on what would later be Stasis. Heh, I guess I had a cool idea for a video game.
Feel free to check out the videos and let me know what you think! If you prefer reading, check out the article Unity wrote on the talk we gave here: Diversity, interactivity, accessibility: How three studios approach impactful game design | Unity Blog
When HyperDot Met Game Pass
HyperDot was originally supposed to only be a small jump from Glitch in the System, but it wasn’t. My original goal was to “just do a bit better than before” and try to get it on Steam. So, when I say that I was absolutely humbled to get HyperDot on Xbox Game Pass I mean it.
The amount of people I was able to reach with it available on there is vast. To the point where I sometimes go into the whole spiel about what HyperDot is to where I am interrupted and told “Oh yeah! I’ve played that!” I can’t begin to describe what that feeling is like.
The Last of Us and HyperDot
This section is going to be one of the toughest to not start waxing poetic and diving deeper into a postemortem. At no point since I decided I wanted to become a game developer would I have expected this. Period. HyperDot was nominated for The Game Awards in Innovation in Accessibility.
Just saying that is wild but to see the other nominated games I was alongside is awe inspiring to say the least. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Watch Dogs: Legion, Grounded, and… The Last of Us Part II. I pause on that one because the original is one of my favorite games of all time. To be in the same category in an official capacity is… I don’t even know where to begin. And for such a great movement in the shifting landscape for accessibility in games… I just…
Well, to still attempt to not be a postmortem I’ll move on but… wow. Thank you everyone for your support. I know I am a broken record at this point but… I really can’t believe it sometimes. At any rate, in the end HyperDot didn’t win. But I really don’t mind, I can say that I lost to The Last of Us hahaha.
And with that, you are basically caught up with most of the biggest things that happened in relation to HyperDot. There’s still a lot of stuff to chat about but I’ll answer some of those things in upcoming blog posts. For now, if you are at all curious about checking out HyperDot you can go here to purchase it on your platform of choice, soon to be more!
Want a true postmortem? Waiting to hear when it is coming to Switch and PlayStation? Leave a comment below!