Party Hard

The one that started it all: a pixel stealth game about ruining parties.

Party Hard creator coverage · Silent loop.

The game

You are tired. Your neighbours are having yet another party. So you take a knife and go stop it. Party Hard is a stealth-strategy game where the whole level is a sandbox of traps and witnesses: poison the drinks, rig the speakers, cut a tree onto the dance floor, and hide the bodies before anyone calls the police.

Every call escalates the response, and enough of them bring a Special Agent to the party. The game shipped with Twitch integration that let viewers throw events into a streamer’s run — SWAT raids, rampaging bears — which turned out to be a large part of why it spread.

Released for Windows, macOS and Linux on 25 August 2015, then PlayStation 4 in November 2015, Xbox One in April 2016 and Nintendo Switch in November 2018. Two DLC campaigns followed: the free Dark Castle (2016) and High Crimes (2016).

My contribution

• Head of Studio. As Head of Studio, led Pinokl Games through the project while keeping the concept and design vision clear across the team.
• Art direction & core systems. Stayed hands-on with art direction and programming core systems.
• NPC behaviour systems. Built the behaviour systems behind the sandbox — over 80 individual behaviour trees driving 50–80 NPCs per level, interacting with the player and with each other to produce chaos no one scripted.
• First year: public demos. During the first year of production, between the announcement and launch, we released a new public demo almost every month.
• Marketing as part of development. Worked actively with tinyBuild on marketing from both directions: creating new reasons to talk about the game, and changing it based on player feedback and what we learned from watching people play. This helped keep interest through the year of development, later updates, and the two years before the sequel. At game shows we presented something new and provocative rather than simply showing the game; I also helped the marketing team with fun videos, GIFs and stories, while shaping the game itself to create those moments.
• Awards & recognition. Party Hard received multiple awards and nominations.

  

• A team where everyone designs. Kept the concept and design vision shared across the team, including people in design decisions and rotating tasks to build technical awareness. This let people contribute mechanics or entities spanning several systems without creating hand-offs or needing constant design supervision. Most developers could make small design decisions during implementation and take a feature from a short description to done.

Screenshots

Links

• Party Hard on Steam