BREAKING DIMENSIONS

lan Dean speaks to Heart Machine's Danny Moll about making the leap from pixels to polygons for Hyper Light Breaker

Anyone who played Hyper Light Drifter fell in love with its colourful, impressionistic world rendered in tiny pixels. Our minds filled in the gaps and embellished every angular, geometric ruin and colourwashed 8-bit forest. With followup Hyper Light Breaker set in a 3D open world, developer Heart Machine is colouring inside the lines for us.

Built in Unreal Engine, Breaker is a co-op roguelite adventure set within the Hyper Light universe that challenges players to hack and slash their way across its vibrant procedurally generated world. The myriad biomes and complex labyrinths that became so familiar to Drifter fans are now rendered in greater detail, with the artistic challenge being to match players’ imaginations.

Translating the pixel art characters of the Hyper Light world into 3D, Heart Machine has adopted the cel-shaded style familiar in games like Genshin Impact and its own release Solar Ash. So what’s the aim? Retain the magic of pixel art’s inferred detail in crisp, bold 3D.

Art director and lead concept artist Danny Moll is one of the key figures in interpreting the game’s world from pixels to polygons, and begins by explaining the team is “explicitly avoiding pixel art, or callbacks to pixel art”. Indeed, he tells us that studio founder and Hyper Light creator Alx Preston thought it important to view pixel art as the medium of Drifter, with Breaker evolving as something altogether new.