Hypsiphrone has been one of my favourite projects to work on - developing my technical skills and abilities in Unreal, while also exploring project development and a beginning in my partnership with Riccardo. Hypsiphrone helped set the scene, as we go on to collaborate further, creating our first commercial project just two years later.

The initial idea for the game, was a downhill racer of sorts, where the closer to the ground the faster you go. We explored several versions of this, all of which lost in the aether, but we struggled to create anything meaningful, in the spaces required for the type of movement we were going for.

As with a lot of the most interesting mechanics, the idea of a drift started out as a bug - a miscalculation in our movement logic, which caused the plane to have very peculiar turning motion. This led us down the road of drifting, a plane that can maintain its current direction, while changing it’s orientation; upon release of the drift button, the plane will jet off towards its new vector.

The game did not win the internal game jam, but i’m very proud of what we accomplished; a couple of very junior devs beginning our journey to create, while exploring the Game Development process, and the ideas that fascinate us.