Steam charts have recently seen a shift in popularity, with titles like Stray becoming the most wishlisted game on the platform, and Hypercharge: Unboxed becoming one of the top-sellers globally. Hypercharge is an indie game that's not new to Steam, as it did debut in Early Access back in 2017, but then underwent major changes over the years. Improvements are far from over, as UK-based developer Digital Cybercherries wants Hypercharge to be the best it can be before launching on next-gen consoles too.
With the next-gen update, Hypercharge will see a major revolution in its game modes, as well as the introduction of a new story campaign that takes place in the Wave mode, following the story of Sergeant Max Ammo and Major Evil. Joe Henson from Digital Cybercherries talked to Game ZXC about plans for Hypercharge, what sort of content future updates will bring, and the possibilities of a battle royale mode in this action figure game. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How did you come up with your studio name, Digital Cybercherries?
A: Digital Cybercherries formed back in 2015. There are five developers in Digital Cybercherries, and we got another friend involved now, so it's technically six, cut the core developers originally were five. We all have a say in Digital Cybercherries, we're all friends, it's like a family business. We all came up with the name together and thought of really cool names over the weekend, and we put all these cool names into a "virtual hat," then we started to pick them all out. As they came out, we voted on what would be the funniest, best name, and eventually filtered out Digital Cybercherries.
Q: What is the origin story behind Hypercharge?
A: We started development on Hypercharge in 2015. The reason why we wanted to make a game about action figures is that we're all action figure fanatics on the team, especially Josh, who's the lead 3D artist. We're fond of films like Toy Story and Small Soldiers, then stuff like Sarge's Heroes, Toy Commander, and more. We've always found it fascinating when films portray being so small in an environment so huge, even games. We felt like there weren't many games that portray the immersion and the atmosphere in the way we believe it should be portrayed. Hypercharge is aesthetically very realistic, with scales of 1:1 in terms of the levels and how we see the world from being so small.
We had the idea to dive deep into action figures, and then we started development on it. The game is very different from what it was in 2015 and 2016 because we were inexperienced to a degree at the time. We didn't know fully well where we would take the game, but we had already invested a lot of time into it. We decided to dive a bit deeper into co-op, defense-building, kind of tower defense if you will.
We brought some developers on the team to give us a bit of direction moving forward, and then we worked on the new vision of the game until 2017 when it launched in early access.
Unfortunately, with a bit of lack of experience and learning curves, the game basically flopped. We had brought four or five more developers on the team, so we were around 10 of us when we launched it. Then, half of the team decided to go on their own ways, but we stayed and thought "We already put a lot of money on Hypercharge, we believe action figures will resonate with people."
It was difficult for us to abandon the game, financially, because it would cost us more money to do that. Some of us were working full-time jobs as well while working on Hypercharge. I was a painter and decorator, then I'd go home and work hours on the game, the marketing, the PR, everything.
We decided to use what little feedback we had to try and make this game more like the original vision we had, but with a deeper focus on the cooperative side of gameplay. We thought "We technically failed early access launch, we launched on a summer sale, it was a disaster, and we didn't get exposure. So how can we make traction again?" So we spent a lot of time reaching for feedback and improving the game, and then we re-released the game as early access 2.0, so we spent the next year and a half trying to market everything the best we could with what basic low budget we had.
We launched the game again in 2018 with a massive update, early access 2.0. It was basically a brand-new game from the early access release. It involved lots of community feedback. It did quite well at the time. We hit several front pages on Reddit, we got on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, it was amazing. It's very unheard of that a game that fails in early access with no exposure creates a second window of opportunity. It gave us a lifeline in a way. We could almost hear the heart of Hypercharge beat again, and it gave us confidence.
From that point, we kept seeing that there is an appeal with this game. We had to reach out to the right people. It was a learning experience on my side, in terms of marketing. It was all about learning what to do and what not to do, and what were the stakes. In mid-2019 things started to get difficult again. I was still a painter and decorator. Some of the guys were working jobs as well. We were struggling a bit.
So we thought "Can we get this game on the Nintendo Switch instead of Steam? Could this game appeal more to Switch users?" At the time, there weren't a lot of really good first-person shooters on the Switch. We basically managed to get it out on the Switch, and we launched in January of 2020, kind of when Covid started spreading. That did quite well, though. We did a good campaign, a few pre-orders, and we became top 25 in the UK charts, which is pretty impressive.
We had no budget, no publisher, we did it all in-house. That was a second lifeline, that's what it felt like. Hypercharge was still in early access. We had very positive reviews, but we found it difficult to reach the right audience on Steam. We decided not to give up on Steam because it's a powerhouse, a sleeping giant. We had a bit more resources, and we kept pushing. We planned some major updates and planned a release for April 2020, so we left early access.
We had very positive reviews, and we got featured on the front page, and we became a top seller on Steam, which became the third lifeline. People were interested in this game, and we kept working on it. However, because we had invested so much into the game, we were very limited with what we could change on Hypercharge. We received so much incredible community feedback, but implementing these ideas meant we had to start from scratch again. I can't technically explain it, but that was basically it. It wasn't viable for us. That's always been a challenge for us.
With COVID, everyone was at home, and in the next year we ended up doing more marketing, and we implemented a lot of updates. Fast-forward to 2022, we're nearly on our eighth major update. This includes things like the fully working third-person camera mode, you can play offline and have AI teammates helping you. We added so many game-changing updates. In 2022 the game was going viral now and then, and Xbox reached out to us about the game, and they asked what we thought about Hypercharge going on the Xbox. They sent us some dev kits and started working on it.
Up until now, one thing I noticed, I think especially Xbox players were very vocal about how they wanted a game like Hypercharge on that platform because it has local co-op split-screen and PvP split-screen, something that's become rare. I started experimenting with marketing on Xbox, and I did some tweets. One of the first tweets I did went viral. I wanted to see what people would think of us bringing this game on Xbox, even though there was no date yet. It exploded, and we got thousands of likes. I kept repeating that process.
We were working on big updates for Hypercharge, and this was essentially a new game for Xbox players. The idea was that we were going to release and wrap up Hypercharge this year, maybe release it on Xbox and other consoles, but because we saw this interest. Instead of launching on Xbox now and releasing post-launch updates, we took our time and took in ideas from the community so that we could improve the game, and launch this quality package on Xbox. First impressions count, and we wanted to give Xbox players the best possible launch. So, we're working on a story campaign, we're working on a user interface that is optimized for consoles, and we overhauled the PvP modes and made massive improvements to the Wave base mode.
When the game launches on Xbox, it's going to be an even more quality product, and that's the idea behind it. That's what we want to do to get as much traction as possible. We want to build Hypercharge into a new game with the story campaign, especially on Xbox.
Q: How was it to witness Hypercharge skyrocket in popularity on social media?
A: Because the game has gone viral quite a lot, and because I am the entire marketing department, I get the toxicity of everything. It's been happening for a while. For some viral posts on TikTok, Twitter, and whatnot, I was receiving abuse, personal threats, and attacks on me. I suffered from anxiety because of this, which made it much worse, and I didn't realize how much of a negative impact it was having on me. I was in a pretty dark place. You always get a bit of a toxic following, and it kind of just got to me.
It wasn't that I was reading all comments. Sometimes they'll send you emails and trick you for it, and while I skim the emails I already read some of the horrible things they say, and they sit in the back of my mind. There's only so much a human being can take, especially when it's constant, and I'm the only one to deal with it all the time. Last weekend I was feeling a bit down, my partner was working, the guys weren't around, and I hadn't really spoken to them about how I felt, about my mental health. I released a statement, and at this time I hadn't realized what God of War developers and their studio were facing, and in my statement, I was asking to please stop demanding an Xbox release date, stop sending threats, and also something about the mental health side of things for developers.
That went viral, it blew up. I couldn't believe we had all these fans and this support. The good side of the Internet came to my aid. I was very emotional, I released a video, I just wanted people to see the developer behind me. I ended up breaking on the video, crying and saying thank you. That blew up even more and went viral. I had support from a lot of developers from big companies who reached out and offered me advice. It was amazing, in the spite of it all.
I was like "Let's tackle this stigma around mental health, especially in games." In our industry, I think we're more scared to talk about it. I wanted to speak up and put a face on it. It was hard. I didn't want to post anything about Xbox, I felt like I was rubbish at my job, I felt like I was a horrible person, and I started to believe in this abuse. So then I just posted a cool clip of Hypercharge, as I wanted to set positive vibes. It caught the attention of Cory from God of War. He retweeted it, and I think he read the message I posted, as he put a little heart on the footage of the game I shared.
It caught the eyes of so many other AAA studios. Loads of people started tweeting it. It was a very bad situation on my part that turned into a viral moment, nothing was disingenuous about it. People are loving the game. People were calling the game a hidden gem. The biggest thing for me is not that the game went viral, but it's the advocacy of mental health. Developers came to me and told me "Thank you for making that video and for how brave you are." The vice-president at Xbox messaged me, offering wise words and support. It was a domino effect.
I've been having issues with my heart, and I had to go to the hospital because I was getting a lot of panic attacks. I got to go for a heart scan at the cardiology center soon. I'm sure everything will be alright, but that's just what happens.
Q: What sort of impact did movies like Toy Story and Small Soldiers have on Hypercharge?
A: Small Soldiers was a huge inspiration because of the way they aesthetically nailed the scale of the action figures, and the animations were impressive. In Toy Story, the narrative is amazing, it looks amazing, the CGI. One thing I'll mention as well goes a bit off-topic, but it relates to it. What we found with Hypercharge, which is the reason why we believe it will skyrocket on consoles, is that, while Steam is amazing, I also think that it's not a specific target audience for the type of players we want, like kids and parents. We received so many emails from mothers and fathers, even brothers, thanking us for Hypercharge.
I think what it is, but I find it a massive game for cross-generational nostalgia. You have parents who grew up with Small Soldiers and those games and films, and the kids now are growing up with Toy Story and action figures. Action figures will never go out of appeal. The parents are like "There's no violence in Hypercharge because it's all plastic." Toys technically don't die, they just break apart. The bullets you fire are plastic. I can play split-screen co-op, and now there's this story campaign.
The story campaign we're implementing in the Wave mode. At the moment, in the Wave mode, you don't know why you're defending or doing this objective to an extent. There's no linearity behind it. We've been working on this for a year. The protagonist is an old soldier action figure called Sergeant Max Ammo, he recruits new soldiers in the form of action figures, and he's training them to be good. He's in the tutorial of the game.
What will happen is that you load the game up, and there's a cinematic in the first level. The camera pans in with soldier-like music, it zooms in to sort of a comic panel describing the story. Essentially, Sergeant Max Ammo is an action figure being played with by the kid in the bedroom, and there's this limited edition of Sergeant Max Ammo called Max Damage, but he's being left in the box because it's a limited edition. The kid won't break him out, and he's growing really envious of Max Ammo.
The mission starts with you protecting something called the "Hypercore," a piece of mystic machinery that's located in all human houses. The Hypercore contains all the childhood memories of the children and the action figures. Without the Hypercore, we have no memory of action figures, so they cease to exist in a way. Max Damage wants to destroy the Hypercore in his house because he wants this kid to not remember Max Ammo, and Max Ammo won't remember him. As he tries to destroy it, a surge of power hits him, and he turns dark and twisted, taking on a new title, and he turns into Major Evil. He then wants to wipe out every Hypercore to wipe every memory of every action figure.
Max Ammo wants to stop this, so the story explains what happens in the first "Hyperwar," and how Max Ammo stops him. Long story short, Major Evil goes into hiding, then on the first level you enter there's a comic strip, and one in every level you enter. It explains the story, it's linear, and it's building up to something. Sergeant Max Ammo can finally enjoy retirement after this first Hyperwar. In the first level, you're in the bedroom, and all of a sudden some enemies start spawning, and Max Ammo realizes there's only one person who can control this kind of toy, with him being Major Evil and the power that he got. He can conjure all toys, and Max Ammo realizes that Major Evil is back.
You end up defeating multiple bosses on many levels, and you end up defeating Major Evil at the end. This is a very 90s-inspired good versus evil. The voiceover is amazing, the story is nostalgic. This is what console players will get to experience, and Steam players as well because we tested everything on Steam first. It's going to resonate with people who grew up in the 90s. When you're defending the bedroom, Max Ammo gives you little tips, like "We have to stop these toys from invading before Andy gets home," so there are small nods to Toy Story like that.
We're not trying to say Hypercharge is the next Fortnite or Call of Duty, they're great games in their own respective genres. We're not trying to reinvent the wheel, we want to show simplicity, we want to show gamers that the wheel can actually be fun, so to speak.
If it goes viral we're happy, but the most important thing to us is that it brings back childhood memories, that it inspires people, and that it gives them happy memories again. We're not trying to be the next big game, if that happens it's great, but what we really want is for Hypercharge to stand the test of time being the go-to action figure game.
Q: Are you planning on releasing Hypercharge on Game Pass when it launches on Xbox?
A: Xbox reached out to us multiple times because the game keeps going viral, and they've been so supportive. They know about our plans and that we want to give Xbox players the best release. They mentioned game pass, but in a nutshell, they need to see how the game is doing. We're going to have a discussion in the future about this, and we don't know what will happen. Game Pass is a possibility, but it's looking good because we have nearly 40,000 subscribers to the Xbox newsletter for Hypercharge. And that's just in over a week.
Q: Have you considered making a battle royale mode for Hypercharge?
A: It's been brought up a lot. I won't lie, it's definitely interesting playing on that scale, and I'm surprised nobody has done it yet. I think if anybody wants to do it, to nail it, I think us at the team could do it - sorry if I'm being biased. Hypercharge as a battle royale? Probably not Hypercharge, but if the game blows up, would we consider a battle royale as action figures? I'd say yes. We may consider it, it just depends. The technical scope, with servers and all that, can cost an incredible amount of money.
I also think there's a bit of fatigue with battle royales, but they definitely haven't been done at this scale. It's an interesting question, and I wouldn't write it off the table. If it got enough interest, we'd discuss it with the team and maybe think about it down the line.
Q: What was the thought process behind the various action figure models?
A: It was just inspiration from things like Dragon Ball Z. We took inspiration from our childhood, lots of the things, like Dino-Riders, genres like that. Action figures are very reminiscent of games we played, so we're making our own version of the toys that we grew up with. We have a toy castle, and it's so accurate, everyone goes insane over that in the game. When people see the action figures they will remember them from their childhood.
Q: What are your favorite action figure, map, and game mode?
A: My favorite has to be Sergeant Max Ammo, I think he's awesome. My favorite map I'd say is the Toy Store because it's fun to explore the shelves, read all the packaging, and how it looks. You don't get much better than being an action figure defending the toy aisle in a toy store. My favorite game mode is the Waves mode, especially when playing with friends. When you do the objective, and you want to get the highest medal, it's tense, it's hectic, and it's fun classic gameplay. I also like Plague mode, which is inspired by TimeSplitters virus mode, so we did our own version of that. It's tag, but it's action figures.
Q: Do you have plans to further improve the customization process of action figures?
A: We wish we could have done more with the customization process. Maybe in another version of the game, we'll do something, or maybe after we wrap up Hypercharge we'll go with our experience into another action figure game that's even more amazing. With five developers, we have just one 3D artist who does all the designs. It's a big job.
Q: What were the challenges of making Hypercharge with a team of five?
A: The biggest challenge was that each member of the team is extremely interconnected to the rest of the team. If one of us gets sick, like the level designer, development stops at that point because each of us is so important. Delays happen quite a bit. We can't just go with contractors or get another programmer involved, so that was one of the biggest challenges was being a small team and how integral of a role each of us has in the development process. Then things like the level design and the scale, just getting the realistic scales nailed, trying to be consistent with the details.
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Hypercharge: Unboxed is available on PC and Switch. PlayStation and Xbox versions are in development.
