It’s got this alien-ness that could fit in either genre. I’m actually having a hard time (in a good way) figuring out if Solar Ash is a fantasy game or science fiction game. There are still ways to find a lot of positivity out of that. You find ways to make the desolate premise engaging and transformative, even in the face of great destruction, sorrow and loss. I think we’re all in some ways drawn to lonely, broken places or people.įor me personally, I try to establish this feeling in my work that even a broken environment or story can offer different outcomes. Now that we’re a bigger team on Solar, I had a lot more conversations with folks on the team, especially early on, to deliver a project that resonates with more of the team involved in making it. We were a much smaller studio when we made Hyper Light. With so much of yourself poured into that game, what kinds of personal energy did you want to put into Solar Ash? (I saw some of your interviews with Vice talking about how the game intersected with your health challenges).
I don’t think I appreciated until Hyper Light Drifter was out how personal and intense the game felt. However, that didn’t always pan out, and ultimately there was still pressure with the complexity, scale and raw technical know-how required to make such a unique game. That was limited, and I knew I had to grow the team to match the ambition of Solar. Hyper Light Drifter, at its core, was about five people all figuring out a lot of things as we went. You learn a lot about what not to do and what you want to do next time around. Making Hyper Light Drifter seemed like a hell of a process-were there any major lessons you learned in that game’s development that shaped how Solar Ash was made? The desire to let players feel lost in a massive realm was the key factor. Pixel art is beautiful but 3D gives you so much more to play with, especially when it comes to scale. Hyper Light Drifter was very restricted in a lot of ways. We wanted to create a much larger and freer world for players to experience and get lost in. What spurred the decision to make that jump? This is Heart Machine’s second game, and it makes the leap from 2D action role-playing to 3D action platformer. So, deciding to keep pushing on these elements, to keep them in the game, were major decisions that lead to a host of ripple effects throughout the duration of development. You can imagine the enormous (figuratively and literally) set of problems they presented. It was an extremely challenging game to make, with anti-gravity, massive creatures that move and even walk, the size of entire levels which you can traverse on.
Preston: We had to cull our ambition in a lot of ways, and we still ended up with an incredibly ambitious project. Game Developer: What were some of the biggest design decisions that have guided you through the development of Solar Ash? This interview has been lightly edited for clarity We reached out to Heart Machine co-founder (and Solar Ash lead designer) Alx Preston for a quick chat about the game's design direction, and to learn what choices helped bring this unique title to life. Woven into those high-speed challenges are a number of tragic character moments where player character Rei and a handful of NPCs grapple with what feels like an intensely personal apocalypse. Instead of memorizing and reacting to enemy attack patterns, players are encouraged to glide, grind, and grapple across open terrain as they quest to save their home planet from a supermassive black hole.
The open desolate areas and ominous behemoths go hand-in-hand with gameplay that sometimes feels inspired by Sonic Adventure 2.
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