Hollowstride
A multiplayer voxel sandbox game in Unity with procedural world generation, FishNet networking, and Steam Workshop mod support.
Hollowstride is my Minecraft-inspired voxel sandbox project. Players can explore, build, and dig through a procedurally generated world either alone or with friends. The world is built from 32x32x32 chunks and generated in modular stages, which makes the system easy to expand over time.
Kind of everything.
- Built a voxel engine around dense 32x32x32 chunk arrays, with chunk streaming, saving, and modular world generation.
- Designed the world generation pipeline in separate stages like shape, surface, ores, water, caves, and decoration so it stays flexible as the project grows.
- Implemented multiplayer with FishNet in a client-server setup, with server-authoritative gameplay and responsive client-side input and rendering.
- Integrated Steamworks for hosting and joining games, plus Steam Workshop support for mod sharing.
- Built data-driven loading for blocks, items, textures, and crafting recipes to make the game easier to mod and expand.
- One of the biggest improvements was moving world generation over to Unity Jobs + Burst, which gave a major speedup in chunk generation benchmarks.
- I learned a lot about profiling and optimizing heavy systems like generation, meshing, and serialization, especially around memory usage, allocations, and parallel work.
- The project also gave me hands-on experience with Steam features like multiplayer flow and Workshop integration in a real game.
Hollowstride is mainly me trying to build the kind of voxel game I personally want to play. A big part of that is moddability. I want it to be easy to add your own blocks and items and shape the experience around that, without players having to deal with a separate account system, port forwarding, or manually sorting mod files.
That is also why I decided to lean on Steam for a lot of the surrounding systems. It gives me a solid foundation for accounts, multiplayer, and Workshop support, which means I can spend more time on the game itself instead of rebuilding all of that from scratch.
One of the design choices that makes Hollowstride different from Minecraft is the chunk setup. The game uses cubic chunks, which means the world is not just wide but can generate in all three axes. That opens up a lot of room for the direction I want to take the project in, especially with deeper underground progression, layered cave systems, and biomes.