Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Hyperbolica is an indie adventure game coming out later this year on Steam and its rudimentary graphics hide an amazing  innovation: The game world is set in hyperbolic, non-euclidean space. In other words — and please correct me, math-minded readers, if I'm not explaining this correctly — it does not take place on a virtual world that resembles our everyday reality, which only seems to be a flat plane, but on a virtual world that's perceptually spherical. More here:

Hyperbolic space allows exponentially more volume to fit in the same 'space' than you'd normally expect. This allows you to explore enormous areas while taking very little time to walk anywhere. You'll find that building a mental map of your surroundings becomes impossible. Lines can no longer be parallel. Traversing the map can result in unexpected rotations. And many more strange consequences that will make you question reality. You'll also explore spherical space, which has the opposite outcomes. For example, a reverse-perspective: Objects appear larger the farther away they are.

If your head also hurts after reading this, the game's developer — Kevin of the popular YouTube channel CodeParade — created a video explainer below.

After Hyperbolica is published, Kevin tells me he plans to open source the Hyperbolica engine so that other game developers can play around and built with it.

And maybe that's the best way of explaining why this is meaningful: It'll make it way easier to make all kinds of games that are even more mind-bending than Portal.

"I think the engine will be open-sourced a little before the launch of the game, maybe around beta testing time," Kevin tells me.  "Hopefully the code will all be cleaned up and optimized by then, and it would give a chance to find any additional optimizations/improvements before release.  So I'm guessing sometime around November." 

While Hyperbolica is mainly an adventure/exploration game, he says, "I'd like to see other genres explored, like first-person shooters, RPGs, and Minecraft-like games to name a few." (Imagine the glorious insanity, for example, of playing a Fortnite-type battle royale game in a spherical reality.)

The Hypberbolica engine is based on another engine Kevin was working on, introduced in another video that went viral last year, but translated to Unity:

"The older engine used portals to stitch parts of the world together," Kevin explains. "Although it is non–euclidean, it's not actually a geometry.  Hyperbolica on the other hand doesn't use portals, it's continuously non–euclidean everywhere in space and uses an entirely different technique (vertex shaders) to achieve the effect.  I chose Unity because I'm trying to avoid writing everything from scratch, otherwise it would take me years to finish the game. I'm trying to utilize as many existing tools as possible, even if it means hacking something or doing things less optimally."

And the fact that it's on Unity opens it up to many more developers, who can also tweak and upgrade the graphics:

"There's no requirements about texture resolution for Hyperbolica compared to regular Unity games," as Kevin puts it, "so nothing different there. Vertex count is probably the bigger performance impact to keep in mind."

Follow Kevin on YouTube for updates.