Space Orbit

October 2020

I worked on the game Space Orbit as a game designer / project manager. The game was developed with 3 other people and entered into the game jam "Ludum Dare 47" following the theme of "stuck in a loop". You can play the game here (fullscreen recommended)

Game Design

Space Orbit is a top-down space game where you control a ship flying in and out of planetal orbits. Your goal is to find, collect and bring back resources from other planets so that your home planet can be saved.

The player can control the ship by steering left and right, as well as by increasing or decreasing its speed. To pick up resources, the played must steer the ship close to other planets so that resources can be "sucked up" from them. In this, the player needs to take the gravitational pull into consideration so as to avoid crashing into space debris or the planet itself.

An additional layer of challenge is added by the space having a limited amout of fuel. Fuel is required for steering and accelerating, and random fuel pickups are scattered across space for the player to pick up. Because of the fuel limitation, the player is forced to be conservative in their fuel usage and use the gravitational pull of the planets in a clever way.

How I would improve Space Orbit

If would had more time to work on this game, I would improve its design by:

Adding a difficulty curve (introducing a system that makes the game progressively harder as you play)
Balance the spread of space debris and the planet sizes, so that that the planets dont differ too much in how difficult they are to approach
Add variation in the mission, for example by requiring the player to gather multiple resource types from different planet types that all have a special set of dynamics that the player needs to adjust to

Personal Responsibilities

In the project I took on a management and design role. The role included:

Facilitating the conceptualisation phase
Drafting design documents/sketches
Plan prototyping and testing cycles
Managing and prioritizing the backlog of design tasks

Besides me, the team consided of an art director, a sound director, and an engineer

Learning Experience

Dedicated Roles
As this jam contained both an art and a sound director, I learned to see the value in having dedicated roles for those areas. It was fun to take on a role where I could focus less on the production of the game, and more on the design aspects to make sure the end product was well balanced and engaging to play.
Design Documentation
One key learning was the importance of spending enough time on sketching out the ideas before starting to build the game. In jams, people tend to be eager to get started - but once you take the time to properly describe the idea in a design document it becomes cleare that everyone doesnt have the same idea about the concept and that there are still things to be decided
Core Mechanic MVP
Another key lesson was the strenght of defining an MVP where only the core mechanic was prototyped. In this game, we quickly realized that the ship controls were incredibly important for the gameplay experience, and so we iterated it many times, changing what the player could control and balancing the numbers to make it feel right. With the core mechanic in place, the rest of the game pieces fell into place more naturally.

Tools used

Unity (prototyping and testing game)
Miro (for remotely facilitating the design and production planning processes)