DETAILS
Engine - Unreal Engine
Team size - 22 developers
Platform - PC
Released - Steam
Release date - 2019
Project duration - One year
GAME DESCRIPTION
Captain Starshot is a top down shooter rouge-lite made for PC that explores the pulp era of science fiction.
In Captain Starshot, the player will have to destroy aliens that will challenge his/her skills both on food and on space, fighting enemies and bosses in procedural generated levels.
RESPONSIBILITIES
SPACESHIP ABILITIES
Together with other designers I concepted and developed abilities for the player to collect on-foot and use in space combat.
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By having a healthy amount of content we wanted to ensure player retention and replayability.
ON-FOOT ABILITIES
I also participated on concepting and developing abilities for the player to collect and use.
My main goal of the abilities was to empower the player, create combinations of abilities and give worth to the crew members.
ABILITIES DESCRIPTIONS
Wrote the descriptions of each ability, both for on-foot in-game to reflect clearly what they do.
Clarity was our main goal due to the crew members using the abilities rather than the players.
ENEMY PROTOTYPE
After I concepted enemies' archetypes to implement in our game I had to test the concepts to see how the players would interact with them and test my own design and it's hypothesis.
COMBAT GYM
In order to test combat encounters and enemy prototypes I used a combat gym where enemies could be tested in each of the rooms that would be part of procedurally generated levels.
EQS SYSTEMS
To implement the behavior of the prototyped enemies I experimented using the EQS system that Unreal Engine 4 has and can be easily integrated with the behavior trees of the enemies.
3C'S
We prototyped and tested different approaches to camera behavior, character movement and control for the space gameplay.
We wanted to ensure that the movement would match the on-foot gameplay, while avoiding cognitive overload from players.
PROTOTYPING
With an user centric design in mind, me and another designer, developed multiple prototypes during the early stages of the project testing the different movement schemes and key bindings.
ACHIEVEMENTS
STEAM REVIEWS
" 74% of the 232 user reviews for this game are positive."
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" Captain Starshot is worth playing. A student project with potential." - Steam reviewer.
UNIVERSITY AWARDS
BUAS 2018 - 2019 Best game award.
BUAS 2018 - 2019 Best design award.
STEAM DATA
Captain Starshot, as of spring 2020, has a total of 72,344 lifetime total units and 49 daily active users.