I joined Bankroll Studios in May 2016 shortly after Hurtworld’s early access release in December 2015 and worked on Hurtworld fulltime until leaving in May 2019 due to a family health emergency.
During this time I got to work on so many parts of Hurtworld and received some great experience with operating an online game and delivering frequent updates.
Hurtworld is a multiplayer survival game distributed through Steam. The basic idea is to survive in the world by gathering materials, crafting items, hunting animals and building a home.
The world is persistent to a point (usually timed server wipes) and your progress is saved to a server.
Full PVP is enabled and while full loot is a server option, the default servers have a gear protection mechanic that helps you hang onto important gear.
There is gear progression and customisation, vehicles, a clan system with capturable locations and a weather and public event system.
Hurtworld also has a full SDK to create mods supported by steam workshop, all the base content for hurtworld is created in the SDK.
Hurtworld is also mod friendly with many servers running modifications via uMod (formerly Oxide).
The first feature I added to Hurtworld was motorbikes, drawing on my experience from my mountain biking game. I was really happy with the way these turned out being fun to ride and able to take on arbitrary geometry without bugging out or looking too strange.
As part of our large Item V2 update I created a mesh attachment system to bake meshes together off the main thread at runtime. This system worked with skinned meshes and was originally designed to power the players gear, it ended up growing to handling most non-level rendering in the game as it was incredibly useful for things like creature variants and vehicle attachments. It also helped to support deep gear customisation and modders via the SDK.
I worked on lots of different tasks including bugfixing , SDK development and mod support, creating and deploying builds, fighting cheaters, live operations such as monitoring and supporting official servers and developing new gameplay systems, for example, clans.
I also engaged with the community, by communicating what we were working on, gathering feedback and bug reports.
I did this through the Steam forums and discord as well as weekly blog posts to Hurtworld.com.
Currently Hurtworld has been fully released and is no longer being updated but it still maintains a modest but consistent playerbase.