C
laire’s trip to Hawk Peak Provincial
Park is a getaway with a purpose.
The protagonist of Adam Robinson-
Yu’s breakthrough game is there to
relax and take her mind off things (and to pay
her aunt a visit) but she’s also anticipating an
important phone call. Yet the only place she
can get reception is at the top of the mountain,
and so her pressure-free meandering still has
a clearly defined goal. In many ways, Claire’s
journey neatly mirrors her creator’s own. In
development terms, this really was a short
hike – from conception to its original release
as a Humble Original it took just four months,
and four more for its Steam launch. Yet it was
one Robinson-Yu only embarked upon because
he, too, needed to take a break – abandoning
a climb he’d already started to tackle a smaller,
more manageable peak.
It was December 2018 when it all began.
At that time, Robinson-Yu had been working on
another game for just over a year. Untitled
Paper RPG, as it would become known, was
a mission to recapture the spirit of the first two
Paper Mario games, with the series having
strayed further from its roleplaying roots ever
since. The popularity of GameCube entry The
Thousand-Year Door ensured a groundswell of
Internet support, with Robinson-Yu generating
enough attention to bring his game to Double
Fine’s Day Of The Devs, attracting some
publisher interest in the process. Yet something
wasn’t quite right. “I never felt like the game
was coming together [well enough] that I would
be able to commit another two to three years
to working on it, which would be the case if
I were to work with a publisher,” he tells us.
That was a daunting prospect for a man
who dreamed of having the room as an indie
developer to experiment with a range of
prototypes and ideas. He thought back to
a road trip he’d been on earlier that year with
some friends, driving down from Canada to
visit several national parks in the United States.
“I really enjoyed it,” he recalls. “I live in the
city, in Toronto, and there’s not a lot of access
to that kind of stuff normally. And I remember
wondering, ‘Can I capture this same feeling
in a videogame?’”
He quickly wrote off the idea of a hiking
simulator, but believed that a hiking game could
offer something akin to an enjoyable nature
walk while providing the player with a sense ofaccomplishment. But how to achieve it? Initially,
Robinson-Yu conceived of a Rollercoaster
Tycoon-style game, one where you’d be
involved in running a national park. “You’d have
this isometric-like distant view and draw paths
for people to follow and set up little towns and
stuff. But once I started putting the art in the
world and I put a little character controller in forthis character, I got more attached to the idea of
running around and platforming in this area.”
Yet Claire didn’t really become Claire until
much later in development. At first, Robinson-Yu
says, he was simply trying to come up with
a cute character to run around the world he
was building. “This bird character was easy for
me to draw and model, and I also liked that
they could fly. That made it fun just to climb on
these little mountains that I had sculpted in Unity
when I first started working on it, but at that
point, I didn’t really have an idea of what kind
of character this was.”This, he says, is typical of his process: he
begins a game like a painter starting with
a blank canvas, daubing the equivalent of
a few simple brushstrokes and letting himself be
guided by the art. Sometimes, he says, that
takes him in different directions, or prompts freshtrains of thought. “I began thinking that I’d
never used inverse kinematics in a game – like
where you have feet that directly match the
terrain and stuff like that. This initial test with
this character was about seeing if I could have
their arms actually touch the walls, and their feet
correspond to the terrain properly simply
because I hadn’t done that kind of thing before.”
Once he’d programmed a procedurally-
generated walk – more of a waddle, really – he
knew he was onto a winner. “It was funny,” he
smiles. “I ended up making it a little more
normal for the finished game, but the first
impression of [Claire] was this little character
with these crazy legs running everywhere.”
By then, Robinson-Yu had already
established the game’s distinctive pixelated
style. A few years prior he’d taken part in a
series of game jams where creators would try to
make games using the 160x144 pixel
resolution of the original Game Boy. Most
people inevitably made 2D games with it, but
Robinson-Yu saw this as an opportunity to stand
out. “There was this extension somebody had
made that allowed you to convert a 3D game
into the Game Boy’s resolution and colours,” he
says. “Things naturally get hard to see when
you’re running at such a low resolution, so it
was a fun challenge to see how I could make
things as clear and visually interesting as
possible with so few pixels.” With A Short Hike,
he saw an opportunity to do something similar,
but this time with a full colour palette. Though
it was primarily an aesthetic choice, it was
a decision born of pragmatism, too. “It made
it easier for me to make assets – when
everything’s viewed at a low resolution and from
far away, they don’t have to be very detailed
for them to give off the impression that I wanted
them to make.”
With a look in place, Robinson-Yu began to
think about how his game would play. What
was the structure? What were the themes?
What could the game’s central mechanic be?
Hiking alone would not be enough to sustain
the player’s interest, he reckoned; he needed to
figure out a mechanical or structural hook, or
perhaps even a puzzle of some sort. “The
climbing aspect in Breath Of The Wild was one
of the main inspirations,” he says. “Even without
the rest of the game, if you just have that
stamina meter and a cliff that you need to get
up... I found that on its own to be a reallyBeyond its narrative hook and the appeal of its setting,
A Short Hike’s controls are one of its biggest strengths“IT WAS A FUN
CHALLENGE TO SEE
HOW I COULD MAKE
THINGS CLEAR AND
VISUALLY INTERESTING
WITH SO FEW PIXELS”