HARDHATS
*Some Survival Required

LEAD DESIGNER

A chaotic 4-player co-op building and survival game, spun off from (and respun into) Voxile.  Use mighty gloves, sticks of dynamite, sledgehammers and nail guns to fend off enemies and build the thing.

PLAY

Building Something New

When looking at where to go next, our team at VoxRay Games looked at Voxile's core strengths.

We knew we had fun environmental destruction, and one of our key selling points was beautiful ray-traced voxel art. Recently, players had responded well to the joy of just plonking down objects. Our relatively new Blueprint system, which placed outlines of structures in the world and tasked you with building them, had been a hit -- along with our carpenter tool, which allowed players to quickly erect various windows, walls, floors, and doorways.  And we knew that multiplayer, while not free, adds a lot of replayability and chaos to any game loop.

So we decided on the general idea of  "chaotic multiplayer Lego survival game", and got to work on Hardhats: Some Survival Required.

In order to make this transition, we made a bunch of cool improvements to the core Voxile interactions.  The player was given new, more versatile tools:

• The Nailgun was a projectile-based weapon which also affixed objects to each other.
• The Sledge was both a powerful (if sluggish) melee tool, and a great way to mine materials from your surroundings.  
• Throwable Dynamite damaged enemies, but also blew huge chunks of geometry away, letting players forge new paths or gather large amounts of resources quickly.

With multiple applications, friendly fire, and physics and destruction consequences, these weapons led to more expressive and more chaotic play styles than the base Voxile had supported.

We also invested heavily in physics, multiplayer animations and gameplay communication via VFX and animation, improving on the base game's single-player, menu-driven focus by putting more information and gameplay into the world between the players. Now, players could engage in combat, dismantle buildings, or construct complex objects together in real time. All the while, we were sure to leave room for loose and fun experimentation and expression.

Mangled Monastery features branching building quests in a jam-packed world.

For example, another big addition was the Fabricator, a semi-autonomous crafting machine.  Voxile's crafting system almost instantly deposited objects right into the pocket of the player. This was meant to streamline the survival crafting experience, but we guessed (and we were right!) that having the machine be more
unwieldy, awkwardly and relentlessly plopping your building blocks into the world, would be a lot more fun. I worked with a programmer to design the Fabricator's functionality, UX and UI.

We refined our vision through weekly playtests with the whole team.  I personally built the first several prototype levels, affectionately nicknamed "Buildslop", and then brought other designers on board, working with them to refine the balance between player expression, beautiful structures, and chaotic fun.

In the end, Hardhats was rolled back into the main Voxile game.  In addition to the early prototypes, I personally built the level Mangled Monastery, one of the main levels where we tested and iterated ideas, and which remains in Voxile today.