HypeHype - Play & create games

TL;DR Enjoy countless games with friends or develop your own hit - all within a single app, requiring no coding skills, just a passion for gaming.

HypeHype stands as the ULTIMATE GAMING APP that allows you to PLAY and CREATE GAMES with friends anywhere and at any time. You can even GENERATE INCOME from your game creations!

Discover the most exciting and entertaining GAMES to enjoy online with friends and the global community, or engage solo! Beat high scores and ascend the leaderboards to dazzle your friends and romantic interests!

START MAKING YOUR VERY FIRST GAME! Crafting fantastic games on a smartphone or tablet is now achievable without any CODING or prior experience, and it's completely FREE! Launch your game, step into the role of a game-maker, and earn rewards!

Gaming becomes MUCH MORE FUN WITH FRIENDS, right? Play, create, socialize, and converse online with your crew :) Participate in enjoyable game jams and EARN PRIZES! We're currently hosting a competition for a $100,000 USD hit game—anyone can join! A friendly community of gamers and creators is eager to welcome you!

FEATURES:

● DISCOVER the best and most hyped games

● PLAY games instantly, no downloads required

● ONLINE MULTIPLAYER included in every game

● CHAT & SOCIALIZE with friends and the community

● CREATE games & levels using the leading game engine in your pocket

● EARN REVENUE through engagement-based payouts and in-game transactions

● REMIX any game to craft something unique quickly

● EDIT using free tools, 3D assets, sounds, and pre-configured logic

● UTILIZE the new Graphics Renderer to impress everyone (including your mom!)

● UPLOAD your own game assets and sounds

● CO-CREATE games collaboratively, even in real-time online!

● COMPETE, outdo high scores and rise on the leaderboards

● DISPLAY your true gamer identity with a personal profile

● MASTER game development with step-by-step tutorials

● ENHANCE your games using real-time statistics and playtesting videos

● TOP CHART showcases the best and most played games every day

● GAME JAM with the community for recognition (PRIZES!)

● WATCH gameplay highlights and multiplayer live streams

● JOIN the expanding HypeHype community

● SUPPORT your favorite creators through purchases

The app receives regular updates featuring new capabilities, games, and assets based on community input. Users can also upload their own assets to HypeHype.

A stable network connection is necessary; HypeHype operates optimally on Wi-Fi.

HypeHype Animation Devlog #1 by Christian Jäger

I’m happy to report that the HypeHype animation tech will be receiving a long-overdue update, and in this post I’ll share some of the groundwork that me and the team have been doing!

The animation tech in HypeHype is fairly rudimentary. Basically, it’s possible to play a single skeletal animation on a character. There’s been a long list of feature requests piling up, but given the scope of the entire HypeHype app and high-prio tasks, animation needed to take a back seat.

Finally, however, we can make a business case for better animation tech: There are internal projects like the Hypet (an omni-present virtual companion) and in-house games that can only fullfill their vision with higher fidelity animation. On top of that, the demand for UGC content on the platform is growing, so we have to invest in the asset import pipeline and retargeting for animation reuse.

There’s lots to do, but taking over a legacy part of the system obviously requires some work in the beginning to lay down a solid foundation. In the following, I give a small peek behind the curtain of what went into the last update.

HypeHype is a live service with tons of user generated content that we must not break, so every change needs to be planned carefully and often requires programmatic patching. I’ll skip over patching here because it’s quite painful and the wounds are still fresh.

In no particular order, lets start talking about animation!

Skeleton Visualization

The very first thing I added was a debug visualization for skeletons, which is absolutely crucial for dealing with any kind of animation issue.

The job of the animation system is to produce skeleton poses, and if something does go wrong, a completely bent-out-of-shape skinned mesh leaves no clue to what has happened to the skeleton. Especially in normal in-game lighting conditions. Therefore, having a simple skeleton representation separate from the skinned mesh is absolutely mandatory for development.

The skeleton visualization itself can be quite simple, because the only information we must have is the skeleton hierarchy (simple lines indicating parent-child relation) and the joint transformations (coordinate systems with three axes).

A skeleton visualization also helps separating animation issues from skinning issues. For example, we had one issue where the mesh importer tampered with skinning weights and breaking the mesh, even though the animation played fine.

A good debug visualization also reveals issues you weren't even aware of. One curious find was a racing game Hype in which the racing car carries around with it a fully animated but invisible pitstop crew! That's obviously bad for performance and something that the animation system needs to deal with in a UGC platform.

Importer Fixes

HypeHype ships with an animation importer for FBX files but the process isn’t documented anywhere and depends on certain naming conventions to tie everything together. The bottom line is that animation importing is only used internally, so all animations you find in the asset store are made in-house or by contractors.

The goal is, naturally, to make the animation import pipeline available for all creators.

As a first step, I did some bugfixing in the FBX importer because some assets did not show up as authored in Blender. A dependable importer is the first step in a robust animation pipeline.

Asset importers are notoriously finicky because all DCC tools use different convenients to represent the data. Flexible interchange formats like FBX place the burden on the importer rather than the exporter (GLTF luckily does the opposite).

My best advice is to treat all coordinate system transformations in a systematic way. The source of great sorrow in importer code is a bunch of ad-hoc coordinate shuffles and sign flips.

A great tool for this is the concept of a change of basis. I leave a link here to Fabian Giesen's blog for a practical introduction.