VOXILE

LEAD DESIGNER

Voxile is a sprawling Survival FPS RPG. Quest, craft, loot, build, destroy, and shoot your way through gorgeous voxel islands.

PLAY

Pushing Voxels

Voxile is a Survival FPS RPG, rendered gorgeously with raytraced voxels in a custom engine, even built in a custom programming language!  I was brought on as lead designer, my key responsibilities being to rally the level design team in a common direction, and to bring the game systems into alignment.

My responsibilities on this project were ranging to say the least! I managed the level design team, mentoring younger designers and ensuring the quality of their work and its keeping to the vision of Voxile. In this capacity I also made a variety of levels myself -- more on that below.

But I also had my hand in just about every other system in the game. Crafting, combat, enemies, inventory. The main crafting tree, from the sticks you pick up through the various crafting benches and their outputs, was work I gradually pulled together from disparate parts. I maintained a demo and testing world, called the Crafting Workshop, which contained all of the latest and greatest crafting improvements and allowed them to be tested easily but accurately.

I also had a strong hand in improving and creating enemies. Working with a gameplay programmer, we developed an in-and-out combat system, where enemies and the player lunged, backed out, sidestepped, and blocked. I also added more ranged enemies, like the Brock Crab, the Red Roc, and the infuriating Gunbird, to provide more challenge to gun-toting players.  Without telling the team, I introduced the Mimic, a surprise-attacking chest, just for fun one day. We kept it in.

I also did a lot of hands-on work with our artists, animator, and sound designer, spec'ing, requesting, and providing feedback on assets from crunchy footsteps to lunging animations to stat-driven, procedurally-generated weapon models.

Brief for stats-driven procedural crossbow models, blending art expression with gameplay needs

Map of Old Wayland Ruins before iteration and final propping pass

Among my contributions as a level designer were:

• Old Wayland Ruins, which served as an introductory tutorial to the basics of the game -- crafting, melee, guns, and exploration. (A collaboration with Henry Anderson)
• Lifton's Rest, a small and tightly-focused level which ended with building an absurd tower of bric-a-brac to reach the exit.
• Trashpanda Park, a request by backer airie summer, which was a more open, minigame- and puzzle-packed theme park experience brimming with secrets and small wonders. (Expanded from an original blockout by Nicholas Smith)

In addition to these hand-authored levels, I was also the editor of our proceduralized survival worlds. I maintained a variety of Lobster files which mapped enemies, quests, camps, bosses, loot, and points of interest to the many biomes using various rules and probabilities. This included creating an overarching quest structure for these worlds, and ensuring that any given run had a solid chance of being fun and complete, even as it was heavily randomized and player-customizable.

A Solution to the final challenge of Lifton's Rest: Reach the World Core using only your gloves.

​Many of those camps, boss encounters, challenges, and random little quests and treasure chests were my authored creations.  I'm probably proudest of the Mildred Betterman Charitable Society, a trio of intrepid old ladies and their badly overstuffed vehicle, who appeared in different quests and brought a sense of quirky levity.