Superhot was originally developed for the 2013 7 Day FPS Challenge, held that August, in which teams of programmers were given a week to develop complete, functional prototypes for games. Piotr Iwanicki, Superhot's director, was inspired by a Flash game, "Time4Cat", in which the player controls a cat trying to collect food on a busy road intersection; time only moves when the player moves the cat.[7][8] They also considered the music video for the 2013 song "Bad Motherfucker" by the Russian band Biting Elbows, which shows, from a first-person perspective, a special agent escaping from a hostage situation through parkour and gunplay.[9] They combined these ideas for the Challenge prototype. The name itself is based on considering the two words "super" and "hot", alone, are "positive" and "intense" and made for a good mantra within the game.[7]
The Challenge prototype only featured three levels across three computers, which to meet the deadline the team strung together in 3 separate applications and called the game episodic.[7] They since refined the game and released it as a free browser game in September 2013, upon where it received a great deal of attention from players,[7]along with placing the game on the Steam Greenlight process.[7] Within a week, the game had been successfully approved for later distribution by Valve, and was the fastest game to be processed through the Greenlight system at the time.[10][11] Iwanicki stated that the positive reaction to the web demonstration was a result of players looking for any variation in the standard formula of first-person shooters, which had not really changed since the development of Doom.[12] Iwanicki commented that while some have called Superhot a puzzle game, he feels it remains an action game. Unlike a puzzle game where there is typically only one solution and one is rewarded for that, Iwanicki considers Superhot to be about having the time to adjust to one's instincts and improvise a strategy for completing a challenge. [12]
In May 2014, the development team launched a Kickstarter campaign to make Superhot a full release, including improvement of the art design, new levels and challenges, and support for the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift.[13] They had planned on starting a Kickstarter drive to fund publication after their success on getting through Steam Greenlight, but wanted to give the game more polish before offering the crowdfunding opportunity. This included tuning some of the gameplay, such as adding a katana that could be used to cut oncoming bullets in half. When they went to start the Kickstarter, they ran into problems being from Poland, a country not supported by Kickstarter at the time. This gave the team more time to improve the game while the issues were resolved, allowing them to continue to build up the art assets for the Kickstarter promotion.[14] The Kickstarter met its goal within the first day of going live, allowing the Superhot team to identify additional stretch goals including improved animations and replay mode.[15] Luke Spierewka, a programmer on the team, believed the success of their Kickstarter was in part due to the availability of the browser-enabled demonstration that allowed potential funders to experience the game's concept hands-on.[14] The campaign ended with more than $230,000 in pledged funding, allowing the team to add in New Game Plus mode.Cliff Bleszinski has designed a level for the game because he pledged for the Kickstarter tier that lets a backer to co-design an arena stage.[16]
The art style of Superhot is minimalistic by design, according to art director Marcin Surma.[17] It uses three principle colors: white for the environment, black for objects the player can interact with, and red for enemies. This choice was made during the creation of the demonstration primarily to allow the team to focus on the gameplay aspects for the 7-day FPS Challenge.[17] Surma, who had not been able to participate in the Challenge but brought on after their decision to expand the game, kept with this approach, as it made it clear to the player what they had to focus on, distilling out the common distractions that would be used for first-person shooters.[17] Iwanicki considered that these choices made any part of the game immediately "readable" to the player to plan out their strategy, while still providing enough detail to allow the player to imagine other facets of the game's world.[18] Surma also came on the idea of presenting the game as something that might have emerged from the 1990s during the period of MS-DOS and Amiga computer systems; this created the metagame interface fashioned similarly to Norton Commander, after Surma was able to convince Iwanicki to use that style.[17] Surma considered how this approach continued the theme of contrast that the game presented: as the enemies stand out in stark contrast to the environment, the 3D game stands out similarly from the character-based menu screens.[17]
An early prototype of the game using Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) support was shown during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2014. The Rift-enabled version included the added gameplay feature of allowing the player to lean the character to side by leaning their bodies, and rotating the character's view separate from their bodies motion. Many journalists that played this demonstration compared the experience to being like the characters of Neo or Morpheus from the film The Matrix, exemplifying the game's use of the Rift as innovative compared to other Rift-enabled games.[19][20][21] Following the release of the game on personal computers, Superhot Team stated that they plan to release a VR-enabled version in the future.[22]
At Gamescom 2014, Microsoft announced that Superhot would be available on Xbox One via ID@Xbox.[23] Superhot was released on Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux on 25 February 2016, while the Xbox One version will follow a month later.[24][25] Physical copies of the game are published and distributed by IMGN.PRO.[26]
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