Hi everyone! I am Adam Robinson-Yu, the lead developer of A Short Hike. I’m thrilled to finally announce that the launch date for A Short Hike on PS4 will be… November 16th! With release looming, I thought this would be a good time to share a little more about the world of Hawk Peak Provincial Park and how it took shape as I developed it.
In A Short Hike, you’ll explore the park and head to the top of the mountain. There are a lot of areas to find and explore, but it didn’t start out that way. At first I just started sculpting some fun climbing and sliding areas between them. At this point, the world and the player’s movement were designed hand in hand, and I created hills and valleys on a whim to test every tweak of the character’s controls.
Through this process, I started to get a feel for interesting types of terrain and how I could make areas unique just from the shape of their geometry. I also started to brainstorm a list of landmarks that I could scatter around the world for players to check out. I gathered a variety of references, either from places I wish I could have visited, or places I had been in my own life. For example, the fire tower in the game is directly inspired by the one I visited in person while hiking Mount Pilchuck.
I also used photos to help me establish the primary color palette for the world. I found a photo of a blustery fall landscape that really captured the feeling I was aiming for, and then sampled the colors directly from the photo to create a palette with which to texture the rest of the game.
After this first phase of experimentation, I finally needed to fix myself on the general structure of the game. I wanted the freedom of exploration to be a central aspect of level design. For me, that meant avoiding any sort of invisible barriers or cutscenes that force you to take a specific path, even right from the start of the game. I wanted the player to always feel free to explore any direction. However, this can make it difficult to design the game as I cannot be sure what the player has or knows at any given time. So, to help solve this problem, I made a quick map that divides the world into regions.
Each region would be raised to a different height above sea level. To climb into the next region, the player will need a specific amount of stamina (which is given via golden feathers) to get there. It allowed me to control the pace of the game a bit better and create a more distinct start, middle and end.
One of the challenges of designing an open-ended game like this was trying to make sure players didn’t miss out on the important stuff altogether. Although almost all of the items are optional to complete the game, I think the game is more fun if the player has more tools to play. While testing the game, I found that a lot of players dive into the ocean and explore the back half of the mountain first. To help them get back to the things I want them to find, I’ve placed a small cave in the back that puts them back on track. Who can avoid the lure of a good cave?
The hardest part of the mountain to design was the top. While A Short Hike isn’t a hard game, I wanted the end zone to be a little harder to climb. Our protagonist, Claire, is a little nervous about reaching the top, and the atmosphere and the music try to reflect that. This section should reward the players who have explored the most, giving them more ways to reach the top. However, I wanted to make sure that it was also possible to get up there with barely any golden feathers. (It’s just a lot harder!)
I don’t want to spoil you too much here, but hope you enjoy exploring Hawk Peak Provincial Park. I have tried to make each area unique, whether through the types of flora that decorate it or the monuments that you will discover. A Short Hike isn’t a giant open world game, but I think this little world is dense with things to discover. Come check it out for yourself when A Short Hike releases on November 16.
