Hypixel Inc.
Hypixel was the first company I ever worked with in a professional capacity. I joined the company in a consulting Game Design position, doing everything from initial ideation to QA testing. Our team, the Hypixel Player Council (HPC) was the swiss army knife that kept the server on the bleeding edge. I was primarily responsible for the Skyblock game mode, the most popular mode boasting, at its peak, over 200,000 concurrent players.
Responsibilities
Role: Consulting Designer, QA tester
Team Size: Core team 12, additional team 50+.
Timeline: Joined August 2020, team dissolved August 2023.
Reference Page: https://hypixel.net​
Game Design
Conceptualized content updates from start to finish working closely with art and programming departments to develop complex combat encounters and write extensive in-game lore. ​
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Intricately crafted combat encounters by describing attack patterns and visual elements.
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Mitigated grind by improving skill progression, focusing especially on fishing.
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Wrote and edited novel-like lore found throughout the game.
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Balanced hundreds of in-game items looking at performance data and in-game trends.
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Wrote tutorial dialog for starter NPCs to introduce players to new mechanics.
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Developed new visual design methods by circumventing Minecraft's technical limitations.
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Addressed player concerns by working directly with community members to understand player perspectives.
Quality Assurance
Affirmed gameplay quality by extensively testing gameplay updates, providing feedback, and working with multiple teams to ensure updates are delivered on time. ​​
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​Non Exhaustive update list:
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Skyblock Dungeons
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Crimson Isle Update
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Election Update
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Slayer Update
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Spooky Fishing Update
While I may not have been the lead designer on many projects, and may not have always had the best ideas, I always approached things as carefully and thoughtfully as I would want another designer to because first and foremost, I was a player.
Creating Unique Enemies
Problem:
One of the most frequent issues our team(s) encountered was how to make visually and mechanically unique creatures. Minecraft has many technical limitations that prevent truly unique designs, so what's the solution?
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Solution:
The team leveraged existing tools to create complex creatures with intriguing character designs and narratives, allowing for unique player experiences. We achieved this by combining existing creatures together, leveraging AI, and spawn conditions. ​
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One of the biggest issues with Minecraft development in 1.8.9 is the lack of creatures and enemies present. There is realistically only a group of twenty or so creatures that make naturally good enemies. So we worked to find ways to combine enemies, for example stacking Magma cubes on top of each other to create a snake-like creature. This allowed us to have low-cost development but yield unique results.
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Another area that Hypixel excelled in was Ai enemy designs. When I joined the team they had already created extensive infrastructure to create player-like enemies using player character models. This allowed the team to use player skins to create visually unique enemies. Furthermore, because these were actual players, technically, we had more room to innovate with mechanics. One such example was the Phantom Fisherman, which was able to wield a fishing rod that when hitting the player would slowly reel them in.
Spawn conditions are vital for an interesting combat encounter, whether that's a giant dragon that flies in from the distance or a mushroom that explodes into a giant beast, without interesting spawns, players may lose interest in the battle or miss them entirely. It's because of that that we worked so diligently to create unique spawn methods. Largely this revolved around item-based or time-gated spawns -- with the latter being where the bulk of my enemy design time went.
Tentacle creature made out of magma cubes.
I'll try and get some videos at some point!
Creating an Immersive World
Problem:
Minecraft has no true way of delivering a complex narrative. The best option is usually the Book & Quill, but it has a character limit per page of 256 characters per page. This makes it difficult to convey a lengthy narrative.
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Solution:
With the lack of cutscenes or voiced dialog, the team opted to focus on delivering a narrative that was interesting to acquire and piece together. Rather than a linear experience we utilized mesmerizing dialog, unforgettable characters, environmental storytelling, and detailed long-form narratives.
One of the first challenges we needed to address was how the story would be explained, was this a linear narrative or a more open-ended player-driven experience? Given this was an MMO we opted for the latter with a relatively hidden story that only the most dedicated players would seek out. In this sense, the narrative was something for players to grind for and discover, rather than something delivered immediately.
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Arguably the most critical part of creating a game narrative is having interesting characters, and that's a core area we focused on. While Minecraft might not have the most technically impressive infrastructure, we were able to use dialog and visuals to make characters unique. A frequent design choice was to have a somewhat open-ended dialog that wasn't necessarily answered by one NPC, but a series of them. This helped motivate players to seek out the answers to the otherwise strange dialog and not just read it and move on.
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Environmental storytelling is another one of the most crucial aspects to get right when telling a story. If the world doesn't reflect the story you're telling it can seem contrived or fake. That's partly why I especially pushed for levels to incorporate existing or new lore into their design. Part of what got me interested in the game and design team was actually the lore and questioning why the islands (skyblock was split into a series of floating islands) were there, to begin with: what made them this way. So the team always strove to reflect lore in what we designed.
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The last area we put a lot of effort towards was long-form narratives. Minecraft has a book system that is pretty pathetic if I'm being frank. It is extremely restrictive, only allowing 256 characters per page with a maximum of 99 pages. Even though this was a major challenge, the team pushed through and wrote many stories within this book system that players could find throughout the game -- many of which I wrote or heavily edited. It was always a continual balance to find the right pacing for these stories, and it is by no means perfect, but they did a decent job of conveying a more lengthy and detailed narrative than dialog otherwise could.
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World Map
Example journal from in game.