Who's Steering This Thing

This is my third year interdisciplinary group project, where I'm working in a team of 10.

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

Link to itch.io for Who's Steering This Thing

Download Pitch Deck

During initial concepting I developed 3 iterations of a board game representation of the game. This was really useful for a number of reasons:

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.

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.

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.
Problem: Initially players didn't realise there was a throwing system when we added it or if players did know about it they didn't use it very much. The interact button also had to change because of a change to the steering stations.
Goal: Make throwing a more meaningul choice by improving the efficiency of the throw so that players have to choose between walking all the way up to the tank for 100% accuracy or atempting to throw the fuel in to be quicker at the risk of missing.
Learning: Learnt how to make an outline shader in Unity for better interaction feedback. A hold input should show some sort of visual charge to build anticipation that makes an action feel powerful. The chaos created from the chance to miss is more important than making the throw easy to use.
Solution: Sped up the wind up. Reduced the overall range. Added delay when the aim gets to max range. Added highlight shader so player has clear visual feedback for when the interact would work. Changed the interact / throw input to up button to utilise the right hand more and reduce strain on left hand. Removed the delay from a previous version, which was causing the input to take longer and feel less responsive.
Throughout development I played a key role in creating gameplay systems and improving the UX of systems.

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 moved the eject zone to the right to make space so the package tube could be moved to the centre of the map. Players weren't noticing the package come down when it was time to deliver so putting it more front and centre meant players were more likely to see the movement of the package falling down.
After adjusting the layout of the delivery HUD objects I then added this orbitting mechanic, which can be seen in the video to the right. I knew that just adjusting the layout wouldn't be enough because when the ship got close to the planet players were more concerned about crashing into the planet than delivering the package. Instead of sending the package through the eject zone players would continue trying to steer, which meant occasionally players would overshoot and miss the planet.

I programmened it so the ship would automatically fly up to a certain distance from the planet. The ship would turn to face the planet then it would slowly orbit around it until players sent the package. The package prefab had to be sized up so the players could see it at a distance. I also created an explosion FX using existing smoke and asteroid bit assets in the project to create the sense that the package had landed.
** In Progress **