Get hyped for Hyper Beat with creator Alice Bottino
Article by Nick Jaramillo
If you’re a fan of games, but not crowds, then PAX is quite the experience. Do I enjoy walking past floor-to-ceiling booths advertising the greatest simulated adventures ever produced? Of course! Do I enjoy being squished, elbow-to-elbow on my way to said booths, only to discover — oop, line to enter is closed.
Many of you made your way to SIX, an expo showcasing the best upcoming games from independent game developers in the Seattle and surrounding region.
Taking place on the 3rd floor of the Motif Hotel, the venue offered a quieter, but closer experience, with a chance to speak with the creators themselves!
One of the creators I spoke to was Alice Bottino, one half of the team that developed Hyper Beat.
“Our motto for this game is: a rhythm game like no other,” said Bottino. As a teal-colored knight you smoothly glide through what look like surreal interdimensional tunnels, slashing targets and tracing neon pathways to an energetic electronic soundtrack.
I asked about her professional background and how the project started.
She titles herself as a Generalist indie game developer, with experience in almost every facet of game development.
Her passion for video games goes back to middle school days, when she had dreams of becoming a game designer. That’s when she crafted her first game using Scratch.
It was a top down Asteroids-style shooter called Space Zombies. She was immediately enamored by not just the creative process, but the impact it had on other people.
“I let some people play my game and I noticed they were smiling. When I saw that, I thought: yep, guess I’m doing this for the rest of my life,” said Bottino.
She continued making prototype games in Scratch to explore her curiosity. How do you make a procedurally generated world to simulate infinity? How does 3D modeling work?
For 3D modeling, she took up learning trigonometry. This meant going directly to her math teacher for textbooks on the subject.
The teacher was surprised, and somewhat confused.
“Why would you want these?” they asked.
“I’m trying to make a video game,” Bottino replied. Still confused, the teacher lent the textbooks anyway.
Reflecting on the fact she discovered her passion, she did what she thought necessary to prepare her for a career in the game industry and dove head first into game design.
“I consumed as much stuff about game design as I could,” recalls Bottino. “I watched like every YouTube video I could get my hands on. I bought and read through a bunch of books.”
She went ahead and taught herself the Unity engine through official tutorials, and later began several projects, one of which involved her friend Chancellor Wallin.
For their first project, the duo combined forces and created a Risk of Rain-inspired platformer called Project Ethos.
It marked the first time she built something from the “ground-up” in Unity, and served as a professional milestone.
“I saw creating a game on your own as a kind of ‘rite of passage’ if I ever wanted to work on one of the larger teams” said Bottino, referencing the 100+ person teams you find at companies like Microsoft.
In college she was recruited by Microsoft as a QA analyst on Age of Empires. You’d think being hired at a large company early in your career would serve as a massive confidence boost. But Bottino felt differently.
“I was a broke college student that got hired at Microsoft thinking, ‘I don’t belong here’,” she remembered.
Wracked with imposter syndrome, she confessed to one of her leads, Jake, about her feelings at the time. He reassured her early on.
“He said ‘No no, you belong here…he really got my feet under me,” said Bottino.
After the stint at Microsoft she worked at different sized studios. Her strength is technical art, though she found herself doing a little bit of everything.
At Microsoft she was a QA Analyst, conducting and leading playtesting efforts in certain areas of the game. Her next job was at Harebrained Schemes where she was employed as a Unity Generalist Engineer, assisting with UI design, gameplay input, technical audio, and bug fixing.
She realized that working alongside people who are good at what they do was invaluable.
“It teaches you so much. I would not be the game developer I am today if I hadn’t worked at Microsoft or Harebrained Schemes. Just working inside the Lamplighters League codebase taught me so much,” said Bottino.
Out of the studios she’s worked for, Harebrained Schemes has a special place in her heart.
“If I had my way, I would’ve worked there for the rest of my life,” said Bottino.
Unfortunately, the development of Lamplighters League was not a smooth one (is it ever?). Relations between the studio and its publisher were deteriorating and the studio was struggling financially.
If you follow game industry news, you can guess what happens next.
The studio was acquired by Paradox, a Swedish games company specializing in grand strategy games. They required Harebrained to lay off a significant portion of its employees. The 80-person LL team was reduced to 18.
Bottino survived the cut. But it only got worse. They were told the studio had one more year to ship the game before it would close.
Luckily, Harebrained Schemes negotiated with Paradox on a compromise. Instead of closure, Harebrained Schemes would split off and operate as its own indie studio, renamed Harebrained.
I was surprised to hear what Bottino did next.
She left Harebrained.
“Looking at the situation as a whole, and the choices they made about the future of Harebrained, and with Hyper Beat becoming a serious project, I decided not to follow Harebrained into the foreseeable future,” Bottino said.
Outside of doing various contract work for game studios, she’s devoted all her time into Hyper Beat. And it looks like she made the right decision.
Bottiono and Wallin currently operate as a kind of “micro-studio”. She’s discovered there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two of them. Wallin makes a new song which inspires her to create more of the game. Bottino shows him what she’s made, which inspires him to create more music, and the cycle repeats.
Bottino loves the collaborative dynamic and the creative freedom independent development grants her. But she’s aware of the disadvantages and has advice for people starting out on their own.
She recommends if you’re a solo dev wanting to improve and turn your hobby into a career, there’s a lot to learn from working at big studios. In the solo environment, with the abundance of creative freedom comes another, much more omnipresent constraint: yourself.
“You’ve gotta find ways to break outside of yourself. You aren’t given mentors or leadership figures like at a company,” Bottino said.
“It doesn’t mean you have to go work for a company, but you should make sure that you are learning and improving and getting feedback from people. It’s important for growth, not only as a developer, but as a person.”
Talking about Hyper Beat
“So Hyper Beat was actually an accident,” Bottino admitted.
It began as a submission for Seattle Indies Slow Jam 2022. She wanted to combine two games: “Run”, an autorunner on CoolMathGames.com, and Sonic & the Black Knight.
She spent about a week on the first version of the game. It generated moving tunnels with a character that could run on walls.
“But it just wasn’t working. It wasn’t very fun. It was really janky, and ran at horrible frame rates,” she confessed.
She had an idea: what if the character flew instead? Before playtest, she added a single sound effect: a metronome click that would play whenever the player collided with a ring.
She started moving the character, hitting the rings as they flew by.
Click click.
And hit some more: click, click, click.
Then it dawned on her.
“Oh god dammit, it’s a rhythm game,” she said. “I have accidentally created a rhythm game. And the worst part is…it’s fun.”
She fully committed to the new concept, threw in Wallin’s music from a previous project, and submitted it as Hyper Knight for the Slow Jam. They instantly received positive feedback.
Two years have passed since then, and much has changed: the game itself, Bottino as a developer, and her relation to the game. What first started as something “cool” to create with Wallin manifested into a serious work of art that she expects will earn her money.
Though she leveraged all she could from her previous work experience, developing Hyper Beat still came with its own difficulties.
“I’ve learned 1,001 ways how not to make a rhythm game,” she joked. “But that’s just the nature of the beast of making games. They’re so complicated you’re probably going to do most of it wrong.”
SIX marked the public debut of Hyper Beat. Groups of attendees flocked toward her booth and stayed there, sometimes so long she had to remind players that others were waiting in line as well.
Overall, the expo was a much-needed morale boost for Bottino and Wallin.
“It refills my soul. I’ve been so worried that this game was too abrasive, was too weird, and people not liking it. But seeing people play it has restored my faith in the project.”
I asked her when she expects the game to be released.
“Soontm,” she teased.
We ended our conversation with indie video game recommendations and any advice she has for indie game devs.
For games: Bottino highly recommends Witchball and Raw Metal.
“Those games deserve the world,” she said.
For advice:
“Don’t think too hard,” she replied. “Less thinking and more doing!”
“There’s a certain amount of feel to it. You gotta make games with your heart…just make things. Don’t worry about how to make something that you like. Just make things.”
And finally:
“Don’t just take inspiration from video games, take inspiration from movies, from paintings, from the way the tree grows outside your window…so when people ask me what inspired me to make Hyper Beat I’m like, well do you want me to give you my life story?”
Wishlist Hyper Beat now on Steam.