About
Hotline Miami is a 2012 top-down shooter developed by Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital, set in Miami in 1989, in which the player commits violent missions against the local mafia while wearing animal masks that grant unique abilities. Hypersomnia is a free, open-source, community-driven multiplayer top-down arena shooter written in modern C++ without a game engine. It offers 24 unique firearms, an in-game WYSIWYG map editor for instant collaborative playtesting, deterministic cross-platform networking that lets native and browser clients play together, and two game modes (bomb defusal and gun game) split across three lore factions. It has been available on Steam (Early Access) as well as free in the browser and as native downloads since 2017.
How it differs from the original
Compared to Hotline Miami, Hypersomnia is a persistent multiplayer competitive shooter rather than a single-player narrative game; the project itself describes blending Hotline Miami's pixel-art visual style with Counter-Strike-style team tactics, bomb-defusal objectives, and its own in-game collaborative map editor.
Getting started
Download the free client for Windows, Linux, or macOS, play directly in the browser without installing anything, or get it on Steam. New players are shown an interactive tutorial on first launch, and a full game guide is included in the repository for more detail; servers can also be self-hosted, including via a provided Docker image.
History
Hypersomnia has been in development since 2013, with its creator working commercially on the side to fund development before saving enough to focus on the game full-time; it has been covered by outlets including GitHub's own blog, Linux Magazine, and Hacker News.
Media
Additional notes
- Trivia
- rectpack2D, a texture-packing library originally written for Hypersomnia, was later adopted for use in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.