Hyper Stick Mania

Spin, steer, squeeze through. A one-finger arcade time trial against the clock.

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Inspiration

About 25 years ago I played a game called "Pined Pine Mania," and it was brutally hard, the kind of game that made you want to throw your keyboard, and then immediately hit "retry." It stuck with me all these years. I always wanted to make something with that same mix of frustration and addictiveness, but this time for the device everyone carries in their pocket: the phone.

What it does

Hyper Stick Mania is a hard arcade game where you steer a constantly rotating stick through a scrolling obstacle course. Touch a wall and it's over. The levels are short, around 20 seconds each, so "just one more try" is always tempting. You can pick individual levels to master, or take on the Marathon mode, where your times across all levels are added up and the goal is the fastest total run. Highscore lists let you see how you stack up against everyone else.

How we built it

The game itself runs on three.js, wrapped with Capacitor so it works as a native app on Android and iOS. We integrated Google Play Games and Apple Game Center for leaderboards and achievements. The website and backend are built with Nuxt and PostgreSQL.

Challenges we ran into

Playtesting, by far. A game like this lives or dies by how it feels, and "hard but fair" is a very thin line. Finding testers, watching them struggle (sometimes in the wrong way), and tuning levels over and over took much longer than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The gameplay feels good and consistent, even across devices running at different speeds, which was trickier to get right than it sounds. And the soundtrack! We're really proud of how the music drives the game and makes each run feel intense.

What we learned

Building the game is only a part of the work. Everything around it, like testing, talking to testers, social media, making videos, creating the soundtrack, and integrating with the native platform tools, ends up being most of the effort. We underestimated that at the start, and now we know better.

What's next for Hyper Stick Mania

Finding lots of people with a high tolerance for frustration (just kidding… mostly) to play it and fill up the highscore lists. We'd love to see a community form around chasing the best Marathon times.

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