Hyper Light Breaker's controlled proceduralism explained

To say fans are eagerly awaiting the official sequel to 2016's seminal action-adventure Heart Machine Hyper Light Drifter is an understatement. While the Heart Machine was released in space Solar ash in 2021, upcoming launch Hyper Light Breaker marks the first true sequel Hyper Light Drifterand it is one of the most anticipated titles of 2025. To help with the transition from Hyper Light Drifter2D world into 3D rendering Interrupterthe team at Heart Machine has taken advantage of procedural generation, albeit in a way that provides more control.

Especially, Hyper Light Breaker is an action roguelike game focused on open world elements, cooperative gameplay and a definitive departure from the solo, meditative experience Hyper Light Drifter. Hyper Light BreakerThe shift towards roguelike replayability – which lends itself to elements of randomisation – needs to be driven by the customized environments and dungeons that players associate with Hyper Light name. To achieve this, Heart Machine has taken a “best of both worlds” approach, which it refers to as “guided proceduralism”. Game Rant spoke with several developers at Heart Machine, including lead technical artist Len White, creative director Alx Preston, and senior designer Ben Strickland, about how it all works.

The developers of Hyper Light Breaker break down what “controlled proceduralism” means.

From the beginning of the project, the driving vision was for Hyper Light Breaker it was always meant to be an open world roguelike Hyper Light universe. Going from a 2D single player game with carefully crafted environments to a 3D open world co-op game with dynamically changing elements was naturally a huge undertaking. Preston notes that the early stages Hyper Light BreakerDevelopment focused heavily on “creating key combat mechanics and more importantly procedural generation systems…what could be custom/curated elements and what would be handled entirely by math.”

To solve this problem, White describes a team-based system devising process that he calls “guided proceduralism,” where the team designs specific parameters that are then filled in and randomized by a procedural generation mathematician. He notes:

“Not having absolute control over where everything ends up in the world is a big challenge for procedural generation. Making sure combat and world traversal aren't hampered by random terrain and placement of…environmental assets took a lot of iteration and tuning.” of our algorithms and data, we developed a system of controlled proceduralism that allowed us to design very rough map layouts that would then be procedurally refined into their final form.”

This includes key locations such as Crown's Arena and a prism based on certain factors such as biomes, traversing the world behind it and then filling it more or less. It's more complicated, of course, but there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes in every cycle and run. Hyper Light Breaker.

White also notes that the use of procedural generation was “pretty essential” to realizing Heart Machine's vision for an open-world roguelike, with the team trying to balance “what it gives (huge variety) and what it takes away (control). Hyper Light Breaker can use procedural generation to provide new environments from runtime to runtime, but the rules governing these creations are set by the designers at Heart Machine, which they refined through their initial experiments with procedural generation. As senior designer Ben Strickland notes,

“…procedural generation really makes you think about the rules of the world…We never want to do that kind of checking to force every seed into the same shape, but we also need some guarantees.”