How zero-gravity twitch-based PS4 platformer HoPiKo’s was made

Hey all, Rob here from Laser Dog. After months of development, testing, tweaking, exhibitions, sleepless nights and the like, we were super excited to release our first PlayStation 4 game HoPiKo last week.

It’s an unforgiving twitch-based platformer that will have you yelling at the screen. But more than that, the satisfaction you’ll get for beating a level can be close to euphoric. We’ve been amazed at how good some of you are at HoPiKo and thought we’d share a little about it with you. Not to mention some EXCLUSIVE cheat modes.

I dare you to try and complete it on Puke Mode – definitely not for noobs.

Definition

When people ask you about your game, they normally ask what genre it is. My reply:

“HoPiKo is an immensely difficult speed-run platformer set in zero gravity, played with half a controller and designed to kill you a lot.”

Controls

HoPiKo’s got a unique control mechanic. Using the right analogue stick, you aim where you’d like the character to jump and then “release” the stick, allowing it to re-centre.

You can actually play the entire game one handed. We have enabled the right stick as default, and disabled the left (though there is an option to switch which way round you want to play).

The reason is that in HoPiKo you’re not running left and right, but aiming and jumping. For most people that have played first person shooter games, you’ve been trained to aim with precision using your right thumb.

Story

The world of HoPiKo is all about saving gaming. In the good old days, the HoPiKo lived and worked inside games consoles, making sure the games kept running. All was well, until the evil nanobyte virus spread throughout the world, enslaving the HoPiKo.

You play as the last remaining free HoPiKo, found inside an old discarded game cartridge. Enhanced with your glowing power gloves, you must navigate the infected landscape and punch the virus directly in the face.

Game loop

We wanted to keep levels compact, but really difficult (lots of death and restarting to learn how to complete them). As a level can take as little as two seconds to complete, we decided to string five together to make a run.

As soon as we started testing the five-level-run system, we LOVED it. It solved a lot of problems and also has a lot of benefits:

• It gives the player enough time to learn the level structure and perfect their path to the end
• It gives us greater control over the difficulty. For example, in a run we can have some REALLY difficult levels sandwiched between easier levels.
• We set par times for each level, meaning if you complete all levels super-fast, you par the whole run.
• Splitting the gameplay into 5 smaller levels reduces the number of objects to be processed, giving us better gameplay performance.

Exclusive cheats

So here we are, the all-important EXCLUSIVE cheat modes – HoPiKo features some pretty cool cheats and these are just two of them. We’ll leave you guys to work out the others (just with different R1 and L1 combinations). So, play the game as normal.  Press the OPTIONS button to bring up the game menu and then enter the settings screen. Enter the desired code. If done correctly you’ll hear a ‘bing’ sound and the screen will flash. To remove the effect, follow the same procedure but enter the Clear Cheats code.

PUKE MODE: L1, L1, R1, R1, L1, L1, R1, R1

ALTERNATE COLOURS: R1, L1, R1, R1, L1, L1, R1, R1

Clear Cheats:  L1, L1, L1, L1, R1, R1, R1, R1

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