Space Discovery

Term 5 CEA | Rapid Game Development | 4 weeks | UE4 | Team size: 4

Overview

Direct the shooting stars to planets to unlock them and learn interesting facts about them. Continue blasting planets to unlock the entire solar system.

Based on our company pillars, we wanted to experiment and build a weird game with interesting gameplay in which the player learns something new about a real-world topic.

Downloads

Goals

Game:

Based on our company pillars: Games that grow | Experimental and weird | You never stop learning, we wanted to experiment and build a weird game with interesting gameplay in which the player learns something new about a real-world topic

Personal:

Because the game didn't really require level design, I was in charge of developing special effects for it. I'd never used FX/ Niagara in Unreal before. Since we had four weeks to complete the project, my goal was to study and experiment with the Niagara system, as well as to apply my current understanding of blueprints to develop something creative to make the gameplay more immersive and satisfying.

Responsibilities

• Fx for Shooting Star

• Fx for Ring to portray planet’s orbit

• Fx for when Shooting Star collides with Planets

• Supernova Effect (Or similar) when planet unlocks

• Sound

Design Process/Iterations

I started with a free FX bundle from the Unreal Marketplace and built from there. I used the fx (Cortex) below for the shooting star, put another dark cloud emitter on its borders, and modified the particle lifespan such that it leaves a star-like trail.

I experimented with a few different emitters for the Ring Effect before settling on a point emitter. I connected the emitter to a spline that ran around the planet based on its radius. I used a timeline on a loop in a blueprint and modified the particle's lifespan such that it lasted long enough for one loop to finish.

One of the design considerations we had to make after our alpha submission was to not let the user see the rings spawn at first since it was distracting. We needed to find a way to stall the user long enough for the emitter to complete one loop.

Since we already had all the framework ready, an easy solution to that was adding another layer to the game, which was unlocking the sun. We kept the camera close to the sun such that player can’t see the rings spawning in the background.

For collision, we went with the blast effect as seen above. It made sense for the sun but didn’t go well with the planets. The feedback was, ‘It felt like we were attacking/destroying the planet’. It was later changed to something softer that felt like an energy discharge caused by the impact.

The idea of adding supernova came later in the development stage, around beta submission. The supernova effect was added with the intent to make the process of unlocking the planets more ‘rewarding & satisfying’.

The initial thought was to use a cylindrical Emitter with Fx spawning on it’s border and using a timeline, scale the emitter up until it disappears off the screen. It took a while to get the width of the emitter, the timeline right but the idea did work. Along with that our cinematic designer setup a camera transition to go along with the UI pop-up panel.

Summary

When the project began, we were all a little anxious. We were used to having a coder/technical person in our team so that we could focus more on design, however here we were, four designers with a great idea but no idea where to start. Personally, I had fun working on the project. It was a great opportunity to dive deeper into different elements of Unreal Engine and understand how different systems work together.

Roles/Credits

Shubham Beri (Shooting Star Effects, Special Effects, Planet Orbits, Sound)

Anand Mohapatra (Cinematics, Planet Material)

Oguz Bicer: (Project Management, Programming, Game Concept)

Tejaswini Kumar: (UI)