Space Exploration: A game design project

 Space Explroation

This was a game created with great people(Zeyang Zhang, Simeng Wang, Xinshu Li, and Fausto Zamora Arias), all from different backgrounds but with the same pasion about interaction and game design.

What was about ?

 Mainly a first-person view 3D game in which the player can feel as astronauts, and is given two tasks, which were made  so the player would study his/her auditory and visual reaction time to repair the International Space Station. During the spacewalk players will need to find their way to the task points and the terminal. 

Design 

The base ideas of the design were to let the player learn something(using a quantitive self approach) an then we based our foundation ideas with the MDA framework.

Learning Outcomes: 

Showing the player insights about cognitive scicology principles and how to reaction on space. In specific, the player would understand the reaction time and how that affects astronauts.

Mechanics:

The mechanics for the game are based on making the player use its quantified self through the gameplay process. Following are the main mechanics

• Complete auditory reaction and visual reaction tasks.

• Compare data of reaction speed.

• Collect “Oxygen” containers. 

• Walk in the space.

• Fix the station.

• Time limitation.

Aesthetics:

hoha

The aesthetic design for this game is based on how a person would feel in the void of the space, and the data awareness of the user. To achieve this we based our design on the Tension gameplay design pattern, therefore we rely on time and oxygen as a main Tension emitter.  The main aesthetics for the game are the following:

• Tension because of time limitation, Oxygen collecting requirements.

• Learning about self reaction time.  

• Vertigo because of the emptiness of the space

• Exploration around the ISS model(Feeling of exploration).

• Value of Effort(As a player completes collecting oxygen to extend their hp for the task)

• Learning about Space physics(Because there is no gravity the player can experience how it is to be in the space void).

Dynamics: 

The dynamics design seeks to pressure players to feel good about completing previous puzzles and complete tasks during a limit time:

• The player will experience Gameplay Mastery, because by completing the first task the player will get enough experience to complete the second task. 

• The player might feel tension while making the “trade-off” decision which means to prioritise the importance of “time” and “Oxygen”.

• The player will experience Tension because of the time limit. 

Development:

Creativity Process:

As we had different backgrounds, we had different ways to solve problems and create new ideas(like interactive narrative, novel game mechanics and science backgrounds), but we needed a way to agree on our ideas to create a body of our project. Therefore we used a brainstorming approach to get the basis and later on we scketched the main flow of the product by drawing.

Prototype:

We realized two types of prototypes, one for user interfaces and the other for gameplay experience. The user interface was done using Figma and the gameplay prototype was done using Unreal Engine 4.

The prototypes were updated almost weekly. Each week we had a "stand up" to refine our ideas and share results from testing.

Here we had a problem with Unreal Engine since our target platform was web browsers but we updated the software to version 2.25 which stoped support for HTML5, therefore we had to showcase our prototypes on Windows 10.

Note: Always use UE4 from source so you could controll specific version features.

Testing:

A hard requirement for this project was to have teenagers as main stackeholders, therefore we had to test the game with teenagers(14 to 21 years old), but this was a challenge since testing was done during 2020(global pandemic) so we had to relly on remote testing(aka Zoom call). 

Here we earned that while younger is the user, the nicer the feedback will be, as an example we had nice coments like "the graphics are so great", "the game is pretty good".

However, in time of showasing we realized that there were some critical features that we did not take in consideration, but colleagues pointed out. Therefore, we received more quaity feedback from older people.

Lessons for us ?

For future projects, taking care on the testing procedure will be a must, from the creativity process to the prototyping itself since that is the key to have a success interactive product.