STUDIO PROFILE

Inspired by personal trauma, driven by early success, an indie gem searches for stability

By Christian Donlan

Two words that click together neatly: Glitch City. This, surely, is the sort of place you’d find in the intricate, fidgety, soulful games made by Heart Machine. It’s a place where you’d find the ruined libraries of Hyper Light Drifter, perhaps, where the pixel-art shelves creak under their burdens and computer components are made from chunks of roughly edged stone. You could skate through its pearly clouds, as in Solar Ash, or encounter ghost shanties made from blue plastic, of the kind you come across in Hyper Light Breaker.

Glitch City is a large part of the Heart Machine story, one that predates the studio’s founding. But it’s not a game, nor an imagined world – it’s part of the real one. It started off as a co-working site for game creators in Los Angeles, and has since grown into a community space for the local indie game development scene. Named after a term coined by Pokémon fandom, Glitch City was set up in part by Heart Machine founder Alx Preston, in 2013, back when Preston was doing freelance artwork and, full of hope, entering game jams.

“We wanted a space where we could work with other like-minded people,” he explains. That desire for shared space led first to “art nights”, held once a week in Preston’s garage. “We found that to be nice, just to have some other people around while you’re working on your private projects.” It worked so well that soon Preston and his friends were talking about getting a dedicated space for themselves, so they gathered a group of indie developers and signed a lease on a location. Preston laughs at how easily it all came together – “just from conversation and a need to connect, right?”

It was at Glitch City that Preston founded Heart Machine and worked on the studio’s first release, 2016’s Hyper Light Drifter, an action and exploration game set in a strange, cyber-neolithic ruined world. The development team was small – just five people at the start – and keeping production at Glitch City made sense. “We had a couple of desks there,” Preston says, “and that environment provided just as much value as it did to anybody, [in terms of] being able to talk to people, playtest, get feedback on whatever part of the process we’re on.”