This is my third year interdisciplinary group project, where I'm working in a team of 10.
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Who's Steering This Thing? is a chaotic co-op party game where players take on the roles of quirky space delivery crew members.
In order to steer the ship correctly, players must coordinate left, right, up, and down controls. But things get messy when you must leave your post to dance for morale, clear asteroids, repair systems, or even make space sandwiches
Roles:
- System Designer : Designed, prototyped and iterated on the steering / drifting systems
- UX Designer : Responding to player feedback by improving the feel of the game through smoother steering controls, adding VFX to interactables for more impact / responsiveness and better visual signposting
- Producer : Organising the team with sprint meetings / leading project planning discussions / organising playtesting / developing plans in response to playtest feedback
Development testing and iteration
Throughout development I played a key role in devloping gameplay systems and improving the UX of systems.
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One of the key systems I worked on was the delivery system. At first I realised players weren't paying attention to the progression metre at the top of the screen so I moved the UI object to the bottom of the screen since this was the primary play space so players were already looking in that direction. I also moved the eject zone to the right and moved the package chube to the centre of the map since players weren't noticing the package come down when it was tmie to deliver because it was off the screen.
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Then I added this orbitting mechanic, which can be seen in the video to the right, because players would be more concerned about crashing into the planet so they would continue trying to steer rather than delivering the package.
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Early Development and Prototyping
I developed 3 iterations of a board game representation of the game. This was really useful for a number of reasons:
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We didn't have any programmers to begin with so the programming was going to fall on myself as the next most technical dev. When I first opened the repo I realised I had lots of questions about how the game should work so by making a paper prototype I was able to figure out quicker how the mechanics should work.
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Even when we started making the digital prototype we did another board game pass to iterate on the previous steering and drifting mechanics and improve the overall experience.
From that I created a one page GDD to demonstrate to the team how the steering and drifting mechanics should work.
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I later prototyped the steering system digitally, which you can see working in the videos above. The system was then passed onto the programmer in my group to be networked and integrated into the main branch.
UX improvements
- Added monitor text for diagetic signposting
- Color coded fueling stations to steering stations
- Added proxy model into prototpe and created temporary animations
- Created healing / dash VFX
- Added other VFX to interactions
- Added character getting set on fire
- Added tornados
Steering Iterations
V1: Steering too jerky
V2: Added tilting to make the turning more visually interesting
V3: Smoothed the tilting / Switched which side the ship tilts / reduced maximum tilt degree
V4: Added start tilting delay / smoothed the ship returning to 0,0,0 rotation