Meet The Dev: Hyper Three Studio: “leaving or land and family allowed us to grow”

There are thousands of indie game developers out there. Therefore it is easy to miss out on a lot of them. Indie Game Reporter makes a change. In Meet The Devs we interview a new game developer every Monday and Friday. With this series of the article, you can learn about interesting indie developers, creative new videogames and stories on how developers worldwide try to entertain all sorts of indie gamers

Today we interview the developers of Hyper Three Studio, a studio with three members. They come from a small country in Central America called “El Salvador”. In 2019 the team moved to Barcelona, Spain, and establish the company there to achieve their game development dreams. For the last 5-6 years, they learned and worked on how to develop games.

Hyper Three Studios moved for educational reasons

Why did you guys move to Spain?
“We could not reach our goals in El Salvador. Education in game development or experience in working on games was really hard to get in our country. We had to become self-taught persons and learning from failures. That way we made our progress and it helped us to get here where we are now.

The indie dream is real, but you have to put all your effort into it to make it real. We want to be described and be remembered as one more of the successful indie studios and inspire others to keep it real.”

Which of your game developer achievements made you most proud?
“In 2018 we had the opportunity to pitch our game to an amazing partner called GTR: Global Top Round. They selected worldwide their top 10 video game projects and support them. We traveled to Kuala Lumpur to pitch our game Robot4z and were selected in the top 10 games that they will support!

For now, this project is on hold due to coronavirus and some other complex process. Still, this is as far the best achievement we have had. It allowed us to move and go up one more step on our ladder of success.”

This two games inspired the team

What kind of games and which well-known persons inspired you?
“At first, Cuphead. Of course not by imitating the part were they mortgaged the house. Mainly that at some point you have to make decisions that will have an impact on your life. In our case, the decision was to leave our family, friends, and way of living. We had to leave our country to move to Barcelona, Spain. It was a hard decision but it was all or nothing for us.

We also got inspired by Katana Zero. The story of Justin is just so motivating. One person struggling so much time and effort has its results, we want to be identified with that kind of people who don’t stick to creating a AAA 3D complex game. We want to be people who have success with something they wanted to achieve with a lot of effort.”

What is the hardest part of being an indie game developer?
“For us, the hardest part was in the economic area. How to survive while you are waiting for an investor? How to survive when your current project still has not sales and no one is giving you a penny for your work?

We tackled this working with online-freelance. 60% of our survival funds came from there. The cool thing is we developed games for online clients this added up more experience for us and for our own products.

And more importantly your motivation as an indie developer. You have to be at some point self-motivated to keep it up and finish what you started. Our motivation was our dream to become a successful studio against all odds. At the end the effort pays off.”

Three Games studio’s Tiny Lands

What are you currently working on?
“We are currently working in Tiny Lands, a relaxing low poly isometric game where you have to find the differences in 3D and experience a beautiful environment.  Tiny Lands will be out by Q4 2020 on Steam and Nintendo Switch. You can already wishlist it on Steam!

Tiny Lands extracts the basic concept from the well-known find the differences games but it goes out of the traditional experience of finding differences. Here is what makes our game different: 
• Play in a 3D environment. You will be able to interact with the scene view to find all differences.
• Discover dynamic objects. There are things like fire, rain, thunders, snow, and wind that are adding a charming feeling where you are playing.
• Explore the environment. If you are playing in a beach scene you will hear the beautiful and relaxing sound of waves coming and going out…the song of seagulls… This is very refreshing….
• No timer, you don’t have to worry about how much time you spend in a level you can just set your favorite lo-fi music and play this game at your own pace.
• No lives, anyone can make mistakes, isn’t it? So why punish people for that, this is a game to grab a cup of coffee on a rainy day and just chill out.”

How are you funding Tiny Lands, if money always keeps an issue?
“The game so far is being developed with no external funding. We have dedicated time to this latest project and gathered some money to purchase Switch Devkit. By investing our time in it, we made it happen. Now it would be great to find a publishing partner for this title for Steam and Nintendo Switch too. “

“Check out Keybol games!”

Are there other Indie game developers that deserve a shoutout?
“Keybol Games definitely deserves a shoutout! He is working on Jack Axe, an amazing 2D Platformer game based on Filipino mythology! I also would like to give Justin French a shoutout! He is the founder of Dream Harvest, , working on Neuroslicers, an awesome post-cyberpunk RTS game!”

If you want to read more about developers, you will find more articles in Meet The Devs. Every Monday and Friday we will publish a new article in this series. That way you can meet new developers!