- Introducing Hades: Developing Hell
- How Supergiant Secretly Launched Hades – Developing Hell #01
- The Chaos of Patching Hades – Developing Hell #02
- How Supergiant Games Create Music & Art – Developing Hell #03
- The Hopes & Fears of Bringing Hades to Steam – Developing Hell #04
- How 6 Months of COVID-19 Quarantine Affected Life at Supergiant Games
Revisiting Hades
Today’s post is going to take a bit of a strange twist. Admittedly it is nowhere near the ride that was yesterdays post, but it is going some places. I feel like I need to make a quick side note and thank everyone for the positive response to my tale of being trapped in a small town. I appreciate it greatly even though my brain struggles to believe it. However lets get back to the story at hand, because it might also be a little long in the tooth if I am not extremely careful.
The first thing you need to know about today’s post is what /NoClip is. For the aging among us we will know without a doubt that it is a command line argument that allows you as the player to pass through walls. However more specifically for the focus on this post, it is a group helmed by Danny O’Dwyer that seeks to make documentary films covering the gaming industry. I love the work that they do in part because they are really great films but likely a bigger portion is because I have long dreamed of working in the industry. It is funded largely by Patreon, which I back and the above screenshot is from a really good video on Dwarf Fortress.
For a bit they have been doing a series on the development process of Hades, the fourth release from Supergiant Games. Here comes another side jaunt, because I feel like it is important to understand that I really love Supergiant Games. I loved Bastion and Transistor was a bit of a darling among the AggroChat crew as we gushed upon it over the course of several episodes. Pyre was a bit of a venture off into odd sportsball territory and I did not love playing the game, but I loved the story of the game and ultimately still played quite a bit of it. Hades however takes things back into a direction that is in my wheelhouse, but more about that in a few.
/NoClip has been embedded with Supergiant Games during the course of its development cycle and as a result has been releasing this series of really cool videos covering its life cycle. They covered the launch of early access on Epic Game Store that immediately followed an announcement during The Game Awards. Other videos have taken a deep dive into the patching process and how the music and art assets are created. This week they released a video that I don’t think officially slots into the series but covers the struggles the team has had trying to function in our current COVID-19 world.
They are all pretty great, so here is a list for you to follow up on your own if you so choose. Fair warning, most of the videos are somewhere in the ballpark of 40 minutes.