What is Rock Hopper?

Rock Hopper is a third person shooter metroidvania which Josh created as one of the fourteen prototypes during the creation of his Master’s Thesis. It is a large bullet-wall shooter set in a decrepit world, falling apart at the seems. A once-powerful group of large robots has been reduced to a series of rusting hulks distributed around the map, and the space is crawling with enemies of all kinds. Explore the forgotten world of Rock Hopper, and discover what happened to these ancient robots.

Rock Hopper is a complete recreation of Minedroid from the ground up. After working on a project about exploring and managing resources, Josh felt more passionately about the idea of environmental exploration. So he threw out his previous work, and started fresh. Rock Hopper focused more significantly on the elements of environment design and combat than his previous work, allowing him to explore new areas of play.

Using this as an opportunity to explore new forms of technical art and level design, Josh spent a great deal of his time researching these topics. He came away from the process with an incredibly refined environment, brimming with questions which were unanswered. It remains a personal touchstone of his own art style - being small and alone in a world which is so utterly grand. To read more about it, see this blog post.

Verticality in level design was something josh wanted to spend a great deal of time exploring. As a result, the majority of his levels make you feel as if you’re climbing through them, fighting enemies in the game space as you ascend, in an attempt to escape this forgotten space.

Rock Hopper went on to be released on Itch.io for free, and was featured at the NYU Showcase in the summer of 2022. Josh went on to use the tools he had built for the game as part of his next project iteration, Praetor.