Things In Space

Games Design BA

You are an alien specimen on a futuristic 1970s space station, vulnerable without a host, but with the power to inhabit human bodies. Use stealth, diversion and trickery to bypass security and orchestrate your escape.

Created in Unity2D by Cordelia Chui, Kieran Leonard and Robert Carone.

Achievements

• Showcased at the Victoria & Albert museum for the LCC Games Design Degree Show 2019.

Individual Contribution

My individual contributions included ideation and prototyping of 3Cs, auxiliary mechanics design, level design as well as writing game design documents and production. Additional level design by Kieran Leonard and final code, art and audio created in full by the excellent Rob Carone.

The brief for this assignment was to create a game based on a particular decade in history. I took the lead in project management by scheduling meetings, facilitating brainstorms, establishing scope and deadlines and delegating specific tasks to team members. Following our initial design workshops, we decided to make a game inspired by the 20th-century space race.

Features

Player has the following features:

• Move through narrow pipes, climb vertical walls and walk upside down on ceilings

• Sabotage equipment by pressing an action button when nearby

• Possess NPCs for a brief time period by jumping or falling onto their head

• Move as one entity while posessing an NPC to open doors and access new areas

• Exit the NPC's body by jumping out, or automatically fall out when the timer ends

• Playing animations and audio using movement state or button press

NPCs have the following features:

• When not possessed by the player, change state using a detection system that utilises event listeners, cooldown timers, raytracing, vectors and tagged objects:

  • Idling at a waypoint

  • Patrolling areas between waypoints

  • Fixing sabotaged equipment

  • Alerted when either the player or a fleeing NPC enters their vision cone

  • Running away from player position

  • Following the player position

  • Stop to shoot at the player using a laser gun that can one-shot-kill if not evaded

  • Investigating an area for a short time after the player is out of sight

• When possessed by the player, all AI is disabled and character movement is controlled by the player

  • Possessed NPCs do not alert other NPCs when entering their vision cone

  • After the player exits the NPC's body, become nauseous and unable to take any other actions for a brief time

• Playing animations and audio using events and coroutines

NPCs are assigned a job title (enum type) which determines their move set:

• Which doors they can open and thus accessible areas

• Whether or not they can fix equipment that has been sabotaged

• Whether or not they are equipped with a laser gun

• Whether they will chase the player upon detecting them, or run away in fear

Gallery

Ideation phase: mindmap of decades and inspired mechanics

Ideation phase: mood boards

Game design document