Hardspace: Shipbreaker
ROLE
Game / Level Designer
Overview
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game where players accrue a massive debt joining the Lynx Corporation and must work hard salvaging ships to pay it off. In this game, players begin their shift at the bay, overlooking their monumental task at hand. The ships in Hardspace function primarily as the game's "levels" and can be considered puzzle boxes, tasking players to take apart the ship and place parts into their correct destination. Hardspace features several different game modes, ranging from Open Shift (no timer) to No Revival (one life) for a range of different playstyles.
Joining the Hardspace: Shipbreaker team, I had already developed a huge admiration to how carefully crafted development was across all disciplines, and in that how each disciplines lifted the other up. Audio elevated Design, Art influenced Level (ship) creation, and UI spurred narrative, just to name a few. And all of these elements worked so well together to sell the idea that you were a lowly worker in this massive corporation. It was clear to me from the get-go my goal was not to reinvent or knock direction around, but to help elevate all these beautifully crafted parts of the game, and to ultimately create ships that fit nicely in this tight package.
Working primarily as a level designer, I am proud to be a large part of the creation of the Atlas ships, and to further work on sprucing up all ships in the game for full release. Part of my Atlas ship work featured a common new gameplay element; a large thruster serving as its own puzzle piece to solve. As this thruster was a defining characteristic of this class of ships, this design has to be just challenging enough, just procedural enough, and just quick enough that players could enjoy going through the sequence over and over without losing interest in it.
As work on the Atlas ships wrapped up, I began finalling the game with the team and bringing it to release. Previously mentioned, part of my work involved a pass over all ships in the game, bumping up procedural level design with a focus on the earlier-crafted ships in the project. I spent much time supporting the narrative team craft scenes for the Career mode, and designed and implemented the Salvage parts feature and suite of game mechanics (repairing the Armadillo). Hardspace: Shipbreaker was released on May 24th, 2022 and later on September 20th, 2022, which elevated my experience not only launching a game, but launching a game for multiple (Console) platforms.
