Contributions:
➤ Supervising
➤ Planning / Managing
➤ Hiring
➤ VAF Funding
➤ Game Design
➤ Story Writing
➤ Technical Art
➤ Programming
➤ QA Testing
| Overview
I supervised a dynamic team of 2 to 7 programmers and artists, involving myself in every aspect of the game’s development. My responsibilities spanned from story writing and team hiring to shader creation and securing VAF funding. This project was a true test of my multidisciplinary skills.
A significant challenge we faced was adapting the game for WebGL, especially for mobile devices. WebGL’s limitations, particularly in memory management, demanded out of the box solutions. We have to split the game into multiple builds, which, at a total length of 1h 15min, makes it notably large for a WebGL game.
To ensure optimal performance across PC and mobile platforms, we developed a custom quality settings system. This involved building a benchmark system to analyze the device and assign a performance score, which then informed the quality settings to dynamically adjust game features.
In terms of visual design, we opted for procedural materials with low-resolution textures to minimize memory usage, as textures can become quite large. We allowed a higher budget for triangle counts, which are less memory-intensive, ensuring this did not overly impact performance.
Writing the game’s stories was particularly rewarding, given the educational objective. Players explore planets and collect data for the AI character, Maggie. During these adventures, they encounter various space phenomena and learn about the planets’ characteristics, seamlessly integrating educational content into the gaming experience
| Game Design
Our vision for this game was to have an interstellar adventure just like in the animated series. During the design process we often referred to the three pillars that are central to Interstellar Ella: Science, emotion and adventure. After studying the series and creating simple prototypes we concluded that we were going to develop a story-driven adventure game where the player would explore the solar system as Ella Ryder, the protagonist.
We came up with 4 core gameplaymechanics:
1. Boost Boots
Boost boots allow you to navigate with Ella on foot, enabling flight over obstacles or reaching higher ground. Holding the action button lets you fly about 2 meters up for 3 seconds, with the joystick to explore the surroundings. The level design is a 3D puzzle platformer where you can’t die but will survive falls. Your task is to find levers, pulling them activates a jump-pad providing a significant boost to reach the next level segment.
2. Moonscooter – In Space
When flying through space, the player can navigate up, down, left, and right. The scooter moves forward automatically, and the objective is to travel from point A to point B while avoiding obstacles, similar to an endless runner game but with much more freedom. Unlike endless runners, where you’re limited to four lanes, here, the only limit is the level’s edges, an invisible wall. Obstacles include floating asteroids, space junk, or meteor storms. Flying through rings gives a speed boost or collects more stars. Entering a boost ring changes your direction, follows a bonus path automatically, and reveals extra stars to collect.
3. Moonscooter – Planet Surface
There are scenarios where you’ll hover above a planet’s surface or through tunnels in the crust with your moon scooter. The gameplay is similar to flying through space, but you can only move left or right, not up or down. Obstacles include meteor storms or boulders, varying with the planet’s surface. You must dodge or jump over them using the action button. Instead of flying through rings, you can glide over ramps for a boost, reaching higher platforms and alternative paths.
4. Glitch
Slippy, one of Ella’s best friends, has a robot friend called Glitch. He’s basically a cube on wheels with tons of interesting abilities and in two of the segments the player controls Glitch. He uses physics-based wheel colliders to ensure smooth gameplay, making it feel accurate and fun to drive and drift. It features a boost activated by pressing an action button, with a cooldown period that requires strategic timing. Levels consist of courses filled with obstacles, challenging players to use their driving skills to navigate narrow ledges and overcome the obstacles. For example, the player has to push a boulder down a slope to clear the path to the next level segment. The boost can also be used to break through obstacles or to launch off ramps into the air, landing on higher platforms.
| Story
Maggie, an incredibly smart AI hologram, is one of Ella’s best friends, accompanying her on all her adventures. Whenever they encounter a space phenomenon, Maggie explains the science behind it. Unfortunately, Maggie gets injured, resulting in the loss of much of her invaluable data, thus her knowledge.
Ella prioritizes the recovery of her data, she goes on a quest through the solar system to restore Maggie to her former self. This mission is especially dangerous, given Maggie’s unable to warn Ella about the dangers. As they explore five different planets, encountering various space phenomena and experiencing the unique characteristics of each planet’s surface and atmosphere, these adventures gradually help Maggie regain her lost memories.
