Spaceship frenzy

You are human engineers on an alien spaceship going through an asteroid field. Repair spaceship modules on time before the asteroids destroy them completely. The buttons on the control panel can aid you. Will you make it out alive?

ROLE: Game Designer, Artist

TEAM: 5 Members- 2 artists, 2 programmers, 1 sound designer

DURATION: 1 Week

PLATFORM: Makey Makey

CLIENT: Building Virtual Worlds class at CMU's ETC

TOOLS: Unity, Illustrator, Maya

 

design goal: 

To make the a fast paced coop game around a sci-fi theme.

contribution to the project:

  1. Designed and created 16 distinct looking symbols.

  2. Created the props along with wiring and buttons.

 

Design Challenges

symbol design:

PROBLEM:

Making a set of unique symbols that are coherent and feel familiar and alien at the same time.

SOLUTION:

Use of EYES to make the player feel familiar with the symbols. Random shapes around the eyes to increase the alienness of the symbols.

REASON:

Eyes are one of the easiest ways to classify alien from human-like.

 

Balancing the number of symbols:

PROBLEM:

Lots of symbols to learn and play with in a short amount of time.

SOLUTION:

Adjusting the interest curve in a way that allows for a tutorial phase initially and then speeds up gameplay. Rearranging symbols on screen to match the ones that are near each other so that players can learn the pairs of symbols that appear on the screen over time. This gives a sense of skill development over time.