Hustle
Heroes

Hustle Heroes is a competitive co-op arcade game built around one instinct: flick your character at your enemies. You attack by launching yourself. Land on an opponent at the right moment and they take the hit; misjudge it and you're wide open. The controls were designed for mobile touch input first, with mouse and trackpad support built alongside. The idea was close to a mobile jumping-bean fighter.

The prototype was built in three weeks by a six-person Mochi Mode team, running in parallel with Moo Moo Move development in 2018. The long-term vision was a couch co-op party game playable on consoles, with individual phones acting as controllers for each player, though that system was never specced out, it was the goal the prototype was built toward.

The standout technical element was the pixel dissolve effect. All assets were modelled in a voxel tool, which lets you export each model in two versions: a standard mesh, and a version where every voxel is a fully-sided, separate cube. In normal gameplay, characters and props use the standard mesh. The instant a character dies or a prop is triggered, we silently swap to the voxel version, enable rigid physics on every individual block, and fire an impulse, with gravity pulling pieces down and momentum scattering them outward. The result looks exactly like the character disintegrating into their component parts. The effect works because the swap is imperceptible. The audience just sees something fall apart, block by block, like Lego.

Hustle Heroes didn't reach full development. Mochi Mode ran out of funding before the prototype could be taken further. As a three-week sprint, though, it showed clearly what the full game could be.