On April 19th 2024, our Creative Director Daniel hosted a talk about the designing process for Void Crew - the original inspirations, initial design decisions, how it evolved with the community's feedback, and the lessons we learned along the way!
This wiki page summarizes what was talked about, so you can have a look!
If you want to watch the full talk, it's available in our Youtube channel:
Daniel has been working in the industry for quite a few years.
His original background was as level design artist, but he also has been a speaker at ComicCon and has worked several years as a lead, until he decided to take the jump and start Hutlihut Games.
He has worked on several different titles, everything from kid’s games to hardcore games, even multiplayer.
Late last year, we put Void Crew out there on Early Access, and we’re very happy with the positive reception from the community.
Daniel participated in the Nordic Game Jam 2010, winning a jury award with the game his team created, called Bravo Bravo - such a huge journey to be now an speaker on the jam all these years later!
Idea - How did the concept of Void Crew come to life?
Daniel has six siblings, they play co-op games online often. All co-op games available were fairly similar, and he wanted to find a game that brought people together, forcing them to work together, depending on each other. This was the dream that inspired him to create Void Crew.
Game inspiration: FTL - Faster than Light
Daniel has been playing since 2012.
It’s about being a spaceship, organizing and managing it.
Daniel thought: how would it be like to be one of the entities in the ship and manage them first-person?
Game inspiration: Sea of Thieves
The players share a platform, the ship
This gave Daniel the idea of a sci-fi crew adventure
He wanted to play that game - a sci-fi crew adventure where players would have to collaborate to manage the ship hands-on. He looked online but couldn’t find anything similar.
He created a first concept art: two characters on a platform, ready to fight together against something bigger than they could ever think of defeating, and started working on a game
In the video from the talk you can also see the first teaser that was created about the game. The video that we sent around to try and get a publisher, and ultimately landing us on a partnership with Focus Entertainment.
Design of Void Crew
Framework
Crew in a shared spaceship.
Up to 4 players, which is kind of the standard.
Shared health pool - the ship - to make people work together.
The Three Pillars of Void Crew
Co-op (Drama)
We say drama because we want players to create memorable moments together.
We use the term “happy accidents” - moments when someone from the crew screws up, intentionally or not.
In the game there are a lot of “simple interactions” - picking up a battery, charge the battery, put it into a gun to power it, sit on the gun and shoot…
A beginner player can perform let’s say two of those interactions in a specific timeframe. A more experienced player might be able to perform more in the same time, and plan ahead.
When you add pressure is when the real co-op starts emerging - you start forcing players to adapt and work together to keep the ship alive.
Plans become obsolete, actions fail and they have to adapt, come up with a new plan and communicate it to the crew. This creates a continuous update of your scenario and adapting to the situation.
This is actually a system very widely used in kid’s games!
Roles - “FLuid Roles” since you can always change the tasks you perform within the crew.
Gunner: Likes firing guns, exploding things, peeling layers off enemies.
Pilot: The person who evades missiles.
Engineer: runs behind the scenes, making sure the buffs are right.
Tactical officer: has target identification and powerful tactical control abilities (this role was changed later in development, more info below!).
Tactile Mechanics
This is about operating the ship in a very hands-on approach.
Since we were going from “god view” to first person view, we wanted the player to be grounded on the ship.
Kinds of objects:
Loot carriables - You can pick them around the ship, or loot from the outside.
Modules - basically functions like a turret, a scanner, things like that
Mods - used to modify and enhance module.
Interactions - Repairs: fantasy of the player running around fixing the ship.
As the ship gets damaged, more defects will appear that have to be repaired by players.
Defects affect the behaviour of the ship - increase power consumption, decrease the speed of the ship, etc.
If players don’t maintain the ship properly, they’ll have less chances to succeed.
Epic space battles
Quests: they incentivize players to go on adventures, having different kind of objectives.
Varied enemies, that demand different approaches.
Working together as a team, keeping the the ship on good condition.
Music is an important element! We had a composer called Troels that helped with this.
Different music for different situations, entities, etc.
Enemy archetypes
Swarms (aka hordes)
Used references, for example Vermintide 2, Left For Dead 2.
Basic fighter units.
Can cause players to panic because of being surrounded, being detrimental to communication.
Grouping them up helps with this - suddenly “many units” become “2 groups”, which is more manageable.
They’re there for eating away at the player’s health, adding pressure.
Specialists
Snipers and others are are based on cliches, so players can recognize them and know how to deal with them.
Summoners - they call reinforcements if you don’t kill them fast enough - their purpose is creating pressure and forcing the crew to communicate.
Elites/minibosses
Some have armor plates that you peel off.
The latest addition is the Interdiction Pillar - it’s static, but it pulls you out of void jumping. And you can’t leave the sector until it’s destroyed.
The purpose is create communication for the players, and give a purpose to the crew - something to focus on.
Lessons Learned
Learn from others! Play games!
Even the most unexpected games can give you ideas to solve issues on your own.
Nail your pillars sooner than later.
Good enough - Keep iterating, but sometimes there just isn’t a perfect solution.
When we started designing the game, we wanted to have a very huge ship. We decided to reduce the size to avoid players getting so lost.
Worked a lot on adding landmarks, markers, removing unnecessary rooms/space, adding varied lightning, etc.
People still got lost, but much less! Could it be better? Yes. Is it good enough? We think so!
Know when to cut - Keep exposing yourself and your ideas, but be open to let go.
At the beginning we had this “Tactical Terminal” for the Tactical Officer role.
Daniel loved it, but playtests and feedback indicated that it was too difficult to understand and needed a lot more work - it was like a complete different game mode inside the game.
We realized that with this Tactical Terminal, all the work we were doing for visuals outside the ship was not gonna be useful, and we’d have to work twice to add all that stuff in the Tactical Terminal.
This didn’t follow one of the pillars - it was directly against the “Tactical mechanics” pillar.
Sometimes you will have to cut, and it’s going to hurt, but it can make the game better!
Be open minded, but true to your game - State the problem, and align with your vision and pillars.
Removing the Tactical Terminal meant the Tactical Office role was obsolete. We needed a new role! The Scavenger role was born.
We needed someone to take on the responsibility of assigning priorities, something like a “captain” role.
The pilot has a good overview of the battlefield, so it was a good choice. But back then, the pilot’s view was locked into first person, so we experimented a bit with ways of giving them more visibility.
Daniel was very into the idea of keeping it first person, since he was playing a lot of realistic shooters. But… there was nothing in our pillars about that! So we tried it out, and we ended up going with a third person view for the ship, which turned out to be great! And it gave us that overview that we were missing from the Tactical Officer, in a much more natural way.
We added target locking to the pilot role, to help even more with that “captain” role.
Adapt quickly - Expect to change your plans and adapt to feedback from players.
After we released Update 1, we noticed that people wanted to play solo, and the game was not that balanced towards it.
We identified an opportunity with the target locking feature. You can’t fly the ship and be a gunner at the same time, so we thought about automating the turrets somehow.
We hadn’t planned this update, but we adapted to our community and released Update 1.5, implementing the B.R.A.I.N. turret, cruise mode, target locking. All this was encapsulated in a new loadout, the Lone Sentry, that became popular amongst solo players and smaller 2-player crews.
Update 4 - Roguelite Endless Mode
Players got very good at the game, and the finite gameloop wasn’t enough for them - sometimes they felt the game loop ended when things were just getting interesting.
We had a hard talk about where do we want the game to go, and that resulted in a Roguelite Endless Mode.
We recently play-tested this internally, with our publishers, and the feedback was that “it just clicks”. We are very excited about this!
Make the games YOU want to make and play!
Final Bonus Lesson: Work with people who lift you up and give you good energy!
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