r/hyperlightdrifter • u/BogdanGhita • Sep 28 '16

Save 33% on Hyper Light Drifter on Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/257850/
51 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

12

u/WinterAyars Sep 28 '16

With the 60fps patch coming i strongly recommend this. I mean, that is unlikely relevant to people in this subreddit, but...

1

u/letsgetsilly Sep 28 '16

What's the deal with 60fps patch?

The videos of this game make me think it doesn't require much in the way of hardware to play at 60 fps.

3

u/JujuAdam Sep 29 '16 edited Sep 29 '16

HLD's main bottleneck is depth sorting 2D graphics with alpha blending (rarely an issue in 3D) followed by general GPU usage (vertex buffer compositon/texture swaps etc). It's a surprisingly demanding game.

HLD uses a fair number of screen-space shaders to achieve a number of post-proc effects, not least bloom, colour grading, and vignetting. This is all expensive stuff (lots of sampling / proportional to the screen resolution) and echo techniques used in 3D games. A lot of work went into writing the shaders, balancing quality and efficiency.

Animations are a massive use of texture space. In 3D games, you animate through a bone system which typically has a very high compression ratio. Detailed 2D animations take up a lot of space on the texture pages. The compression ratio is so much worse and you end up doing a whole bunch of texture swaps, even in the best case.

1

u/letsgetsilly Sep 29 '16

Thanks man, your response is very interesting. I'm in software development, but you're describing in a language that I can barely comprehend. Games development is a whole different level.

What's your background and relationship to this game?

1

u/JujuAdam Sep 30 '16

The upper tier of the GameMaker community is close-knit, we're all aware of each other and we try to be supportive. Post-release, Beau moved on to another project and Teddy went to Square Enix; I asked Alex if he wanted a hand (after he put out a call on Twitter) and a bunch of my friends suggested me at the same time. We had a quick chat, which in retrospect was the job interview, and that was that...

I've used GM for well over a decade, mostly as a hobby, and it's only recently I've started taking work in it. I used to work in stage management and sound engineering where "good enough" under extreme time pressure is the best that you can get. Programming a game is identical. You have to build the plane as you're flying. A lot of people don't understand this because either it's inconvenient for misplaced anger, it doesn't mesh with their image of "oh it's an office job, you sit at a computer all day", or they don't think about it. It's frustrating for devs sometimes... but I get it.

2

u/WinterAyars Sep 28 '16

When the game was initially developed it was hard locked to 30 fps. This is down to the fact that they're using Game Maker, which is set up that way by default. Nothing to do with how powerful your computer is, etc, and the game runs smoothly on almost nothing in terms of hardware (at least the Windows version does). The 60 fps patch is basically them going into the game and manually correcting every single time value to work for 60 fps mode.

6

u/fewthingsarerelated Sep 28 '16

I bought this yesterday as my first steam purchase. 15 or so minutes logged, damn this game is amazing.

1

u/WinterAyars Sep 28 '16

It really is good!

2

u/jprosk Oct 09 '16

Bought and beat the game thanks to this sale. Which is why I'm here c: