Lucy recommends: HYPERDROP

Welcome to the weekend!

I'm currently packing my bags to travel to Gamescom in Cologne. I'm super excited to head back to the show and check out a lot of upcoming indie games from all over the world. My schedule is packed, and I can't wait to tell you all about my favorites from the week!

Overall, this week has been pretty busy with prep for the show, emails, calls, and even more emails, so I'm happy that the reveal of this game lined up with a time where I just needed to switch my brain off, listen to some incredible music, and watch numbers go up. That's right, this week's pick is HYPERDROP!

More on this hypnotic game and a word from its creator after the jump!

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What is HYPERDROP?

HYPERDROP's full title is actually HYPERDROP: A Pachinko Roguelite. It pretty much does what it says on the tin, but add in some pulsing beats and Geometry Wars-esque art direction.

Why HYPERDROP rules

Drop ball, ball bounce off peg, number go up.

I make no secret of my love for Peggle: I think it's one of the best games ever made, its sequel had the best E3 announcement of all time (sandwiched between Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare and Titanfall, no less) and it is a crime that the original no longer works on mobile*. Games like Peglin and Roundguard scratch the itch, but I always want more.

Which is exactly how HYPERDROP caught my eye. There are significant differences, of course (lack of a talking unicorn being one), but overall it scratches the Peggle itch and makes gameplay tweaks I didn't even know I wanted.

See, Peggle doesn't offer the player that much control, if you think about it. You fire each ball and desperately hammer the bumpers to try and fling balls back up the board, but that's it. The board is already set, and it's mostly luck if you hit all the pegs and get a high score. While clearing the board isn't the goal in HYPERDROP, a high score certainly is, and you get to directly influence that by upgrading your pegs in all manner of ways.

From cannons to coconuts, there are so many different types of pegs to place and ball types with their own properties to use that at times, HYPERDROP can feel like you're some kind of mastermind looking down at your own twisted creation, beating the game at its own, er, game. You can move your peg upgrades, and buy new ones between rounds. You can change your ball loadout, and take risks with certain elements that will hopefully pay off in the long run. Something not working out? No problem, you can move pegs as you like, and re-drop balls to get a better angle on something you've been setting up.

A few rounds in, and HYPERDROP looks utterly chaotic. It feels it too, with ball after ball flinging around the board you've created, a camera trying to keep up, a sea of neon to get lost in, backed by pulsing, yet somehow soothing, electronic beats. In later levels, I end up just staring at my screen blankly, not yet completely familiar with every peg's upgrade, but no matter, my score is still going up. HYPERDROP activates my lizard brain in just the right way, the Peggle way, and if this demo is just a taste of what's to come, I can't wait.

*don't even get me started on Peggle Blast.

For fans of

Peggle, RACCOIN, Tetris Effect, Lumines Arise

Try it yourself!

A word from the developer

I caught up with developer Aaron Dark over email to ask him my burning questions after a couple of hours with the demo.

LFG: What’s the background of Dark Dark Goose as a studio, and how many people are working on HYPERDROP?
Aaron Dark: Dark Dark Goose was founded by myself - Aaron Dark (we call our 4yo daughter a goose, so the names are a reference to us) as a milestone of being signed with a publisher. We intend to make more fun and fresh games - but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I created the prototype using visual scripting when I pitched it to Devolver. Since then, I’ve brought on a dev, tech artist and some ad hoc contractors. It’s a lean team for sure.

What were the origins and inspirations for HYPERDROP?
I haven’t made a game before, I only started tinkering with Unity 2 years ago as a hobby while I worked full time at a bank. My goal was to just release a game, but the first few prototypes just weren’t fun. Against the advice of all online indie gurus, I kept creating new prototypes until I found myself playing my own game more than developing it.

I’ve played video games my entire life. Since 4 I was playing original Mario on NES and video games have been a huge part of my 36 year old life. I feel like I’ve been playing games for so long I’ve become so incredibly aware of games telling me to press A, run to the next quest marker, scissor-paper-rock frameworks etc. They’re reliable and reused tropes for a reason - it’d be hypocritical to dismiss them when my game relies on them too - but as a Dad I don’t have a lot of time to sink into gaming anymore. I just wanted something different I could play on the couch for 10-20 mins, which is why I picked a physics-based game.

Every (peg) perk is just another way to manipulate Unity’s physics engine, and even I don’t have complete control of what happens. I’m also a big music person. When I played Tetris Effect and Lumines Arise I wondered why more games haven’t tried to merge them together more. What listening to music does to the body in addition to what a puzzle game does to your brain just feels so satisfying together.

Why Pachinko?
To me, Pachinko is a way to instantly relate my game to balls dropping down pegs. I wasn’t even fully aware of the rules of traditional Pachinko when making the prototype. It’s much easier to say that then “a strategic physics-based, rube-golberg, sandbox with sick beats”. What the idea of Pachinko does for me is that no 2 drops are the same. The game starts as pure luck and I give the players a toolkit to create as much strategy as possible (or double down on the chaos!). It’s a constant tug-of-war between the two.

I spoke to the BALL x PITT devs last year, and they were fascinated by gambling/casino games and applied a lot of mechanics/concepts from those games to their video game. Is it the same case for you?
My career is in user experience, and I have an intense curiosity for why things are fun (what a way to ruin fun, right?). I think gambling games use these underlying principles - risk and reward, variable rewards, anticipation, submitting to lights/sounds, tactile nature of card flipping or roulettes spinning - and tie them into extracting money from people. But the underlying principles are used everywhere (I find golf so intoxicating because each swing is a variable reward, you COULD hit that amazing shot next time! You won’t though.) and HYPERDROP certainly uses those underlying principles. But the biggest concept it leans on is tension and release. Music does the same thing too, the build ups, the bass drops, even the selection of individual notes in a melody.

So when you drop a ball in HYPERDROP, you’re watching the blue and red go up, it's missing things you wanted it to hit, but then hitting things you didn’t expect, the lights/sounds/music are all escalating in anticipation and then boom - you get that large satisfying score and you’re ready to do it all over again. I tried to intensify what I believe to be Balatro’s greatest tactic - the anticipation of score. You don’t know exactly what you’re going to score - you can’t calculate the blue x red fast enough - but the sounds slowly increase, the speed of card flipping increases, flames go up over your score then you finally see your score and you get that feeling of release!

I'd love to know more about the soundtrack and how that compliments the gameplay. I definitely felt like I was getting into a flow state with everything combining.
The soundtrack is made by the extremely talented, humble and fellow West Aussie, Joseph Murphy. The style of the game was built around the first track he made for me (the one in the demo). All of his music makes me want to go for a long drive and listen on repeat. He’s never made a video game soundtrack (neither.) so he originally gave me a 3 min song that started and finished. We had to dissect it together into loops and rising intensities so we could integrate it into gameplay. He regularly makes this music (Ytho on Spotify) so I knew he’d come through with the goods.

The audio visualizations are actually boring without the song playing. Our process was to make background VFX that responded to frequencies in the music. The patterns that emerge are only as interesting as the music you attach the spectrum analyser to. So we lean into the personality of the track. If it has big booming bass notes, there are background VFX that respond to that frequency. Or if there is a flutter of hi-hats a smaller detail fires off. We’ve got a bit of it in the demo but we’re looking to go deeper still!

The demo already feels pretty substantial: what plans do you have for the full game that you can tease?
The brief was to make 15-30 mins of gameplay for the demo, but I’ve seen people clock 9 hours on Steam - it’s insane! Right now you get 1 stage - Classic. The release will have more stages, each with their own unique peg layout, hazards, background visualisations and soundtrack. Each stage forces the player to lean on different strategies. There will be increased (and decreased) difficulties. Challenge modes that force strict rulesets (think events in Smash Bros Melee. Could you complete a run with only 4 metal balls?). A plan for an endless mode/new game +. There will be at least double the perks (25 in the demo), more ball mods, more ball shapes, more level modifiers, more bosses, more starter packs. All of these are built to be used on every stage, We’re really trying to build in replayability - I want to have a fresh experience when I play the game too!

Thanks so much for reading! I'll be back next week with my picks from Gamescom, as well as Peek at the Week, my cheat sheet for what's happening in the world of indies that you need to keep an eye on. Tschüs!