Technical game designer - QA Tester
Forgotten Space is a third person survival game where you play as a mechanic stranded on a seemingly abandoned space station. Explore the SS Valiant to find the parts needed to repair the ship and escape while you fight the servants of a rogue AI and find the journal entries of the rest of the crew to find out what happened before you woke up.
Team size: 4.
Engine: Unity.
3D Assets by Synty Studios.
As a designer
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Take the first draft (which was written by the whole team) of the Game Design Document and polish it, writing the story and the specifics of each enemy, interactable prop, puzzle and visual element found in the game.
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After the GDD was done I created a beat chart so the flow of the game was integrated with the story in a cohesive and immersive way. I separated the game in three acts which determined how the tutorial was going to play out, the objectives of the player and which zones were available to the player at any given time. Using the beat chart as a reference point I placed the ship's parts, enemies, puzzles and journal entries in a way that felt organic without making the game completely linear. I also left some easter eggs here and there.
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The biggest challenge here was integrating everything into a pre-existing map since we didn't have enough time to build one.
Here's the beat chart I mentioned earlier:
As a programmer
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Build the inventory system from the ground up, making sure it was clean and intuitive. The biggest challenge I faced was making an inventory that accomodated multiple functionalities depending on which item you stored.
The three main categories were:
- Currencies: Used to buy consumables and craft upgrades. Those were easy since I only had to store how much of each one of them the player had.
- Journal entries: These guided you through the story of Forgotten Space and were scattered all across the map. The tricky part was that once you found one you were able to access that specific entry through the inventory screen so I had to use buttons and give each entry a unique ID so the game knew which entry the player wanted to read.
- Ship parts: You had to find all of them to repair your ship. In terms of inventory functionality the only thing the player needed to know was which ones he had and how many were left, so I just needed to store a representative image for each of them.
