This idea was combined with Preston’s love for the dungeon crawling atmosphere and combat challenges of A Link to the Past. It was this experience that led Preston to the idea of Hyper Light Drifter, wherein the player takes control of the protagonist, the Drifter, a mysterious figure with an even more mysterious disease.

It was during his college years that Preston first began channeling this deficit into art in the form of film and painting. Preston was born with congenital heart disease which caused innumerable problems for his health throughout his life, including digestive and immune-system issues. The idea for Hyper Light Drifter came from Preston’s own life experiences.

With this new team, the final product was released in March of 2016 and, owing to their new funding, Heart Machine was able to port the game to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in July of the same year, with plans for a Nintendo Switch port later this year. With the project’s popularity, the Kickstarter was able to amass around $600,000, allowing Preston to hire new programmers, concept artists, and background artists, and Rich Vreeland, better known as Disasterpeace, as composer.

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