Locally Made Video Game Big Hops Embraces “Coyote Time”

In video games, superhuman abilities are the norm. You might not notice that Mario’s vertical leap is several times his height, or that he can change direction in midair. For those behind the controller of a platformer – aka, a game centered on running and jumping – those feats don’t feel extraordinary, they just feel good.

Chris Wade, a student of movement in video games, offers another example: Coyote Time. “Like Wile E. Coyote, who walks off a ledge and hangs in the air for a little bit. In a lot of platformer games you walk off a ledge and then there’s an extra .1 or .15 seconds that you can still jump,” Wade explains. “Any game that doesn’t do that feels really bad.”

He would know. Wade has spent the last six and a half years as the director of Big Hops, a new release from local studio Luckshot Games, that follows Hop, an adventurous frog attempting to leap, roll, swing, climb, and fling himself back home. Over the course of development Wade has also found himself the art director, the marketing director, and the business planner for the small team. Talking to Wade, it doesn’t take long to realize “gameplay designer” belongs toward the top of that list of titles. 

“The things that I like most about Hops are the moveset, the design ideas, and what we’re doing [differently] in the space of platformers,” Wade says. He can and does expound on design and movement topics like Coyote Time or input buffering, and somehow can get you excited about similarly niche concepts with him. He mentions the most recent Zelda games and Mario Odyssey as inspirations for the world around his amphibian protagonist and the way Hop gets to his destinations.

Another inspiration – Wade calls it an “anti-inspiration” – was his work in the VR field. One of the cardinal rules of VR design is to not move the character, because it tends to make the player sick. That limitation made him all the more excited to work on Big Hops in its nascent stages before he decided to focus on the game full-time. Wade also credits the VR company where he worked, Owlchemy Labs, for instilling in him a desire to make sure that objects in the game act the way the player expects. This avoids creating what Wade calls a “beautiful hallway,” or a world players look at but don’t touch. Playing as a frog with a yen for exploration in Big Hops, not being able to smash that pot, eat that bug, or climb that pillar would feel counterintuitive. 

There were also lessons Wade learned from Luckshot Games’ previous release, Sausage Sports Club. Starring a cavalcade of top-heavy, cylindrical animals going head-to-head in floppy battle, the multiplayer-focused game was a side-hustle for only about three years. The shorter development time forced Wade to leave ideas on the cutting room floor. “I just couldn’t finish all the pieces of it,” he admits. “I can look back with rose-tinted glasses like, ‘Yeah, that was really fun, and I learned a lot.’”

At the very least, he left Sausage Sports Club with a love for animals and how they get around. So when ideas for Big Hops started percolating in Wade’s brain, he knew where to start: “I made a big list of animals and said, ‘Oh an elephant trunk would be interesting,’ or, ‘An anteater has a weird tongue.’”

Ultimately the unassuming frog rose to the top of the list. There were just too many possibilities to pass up. Wade explains, “You use your tongue to interact with things, you could climb on walls, you could wall run, and ledge grab, and do a bunch of parkour-y stuff.”  

At the other end of the development cycle was the period of final touches, a stage that can drag on. “We’ve been trying to say ‘when’ for about a year,” Wade says about the homestretch. Hindering his efforts to fine-tune the game was finding people who both love games and also understand concepts like Coyote Time. “It’s hard to get platformer freaks who can talk about what they feel is wrong in a way that you can address.” 

On top of that, each tweak and adjustment to the way Hop traverses the world around him comes with a whole set of issues that played a part in the amount of time it took to cross the finish line. Wade didn’t want to compromise like he did to get Sausage Sports Club in front of players. 

With Big Hops, he has few regrets. “I was concerned about being sick of the genre,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that we got every damn idea out.”