Summary :
The project : - Team of 5 developers
- 3 months of development
- Post-apocalypse game context
- Manage passengers and ressources
- Event-based narration
My role : - +/- 250 individual assets
- Animated Character generator
- Level design
- Visual effects
- Background parallax
- Artistic direction
Hyperaustral is a casual top-down management game taking place in a post-apocalypse setting. In this game, the world has just undergone an immense catastrophic event and people are forced onto ark-like airships, hoping to find somewhere safe to land that hasn't been flooded.
The main game loop consists of checking your passenger's needs so that they stay healthy and efficient, as well as assigning them to the right rooms to meet those needs and ensure the production of enough resources to keep your airship in flight.
This is periodically interrupted by random events that spice up the flight, with accidents happening, passenger interactions, weather events.. All of which may influence your production, or the needs of your passengers.
If a passenger lacks food or energy, they will lose health and ultimately die. If you have no more passengers, then your trip ends here.
If a passenger works for too long, their mood will drop and they will lose more and more efficiency in their work. It was also planned that passenger mood would influence the overall "luck" regarding randomized events.
Throughout the flight, progress will be made on the flight chart, bringing you closer to your goal each second. At specific progress milestones, large events will happen with simple cinematic frames, where you as a player will receive a radio message, telling you to head towards Antarctica, meet another flying ship, land in the safe zone...
The most interesting aspect of this project would be the visuals, with two out of the five people in the team taking the role of artists for half of the three months period, leading to much more polished and unique visuals than other projects I have been a part of.
In fact, I took for the most part of this project the role of Technical Artist, by creating the visuals for characters, decors, the ship, and the background, and assembling them to ensure they worked together, creating the effects to make it more immersive, and connecting them to the other technical parts created by the rest of the team. Because of this, I was made responsible for the character creation aspect of the game. To make it simple, we wanted the passengers aboard the ship to be generated randomly at the start, in order to add some life and fun personal elements to each. However, if this were the case we needed to be able to reload the same exact character if the game was stopped and reloaded. Similarly, because we were working in 2D and using sprites, I also needed to figure out a functional method to generate animated characters with varying colors, hairstyles, clothes...
In order to achieve this, I decided to split each character in multiple layers : skin, hair, shirt, pants, shoes. This way, I could create the base animations in pixel art, separate each layer and export it individually, and animate them together with a coordinator script.
To allow variation in hairstyles and clothes, this meant I had to animate each variation separately as well, for each animation (thankfully, with this current version of the game we only needed an idle animation, and a walking animation).
Finally, to allow color variation, I decided to create each animation in grayscale (black and white scale), with the base color as white. With that decision, it became possible to set the color of each sprite in Unity, and therefore not need to create one animation per color, per item.
Additionally, in order to be able to save and load specific character appearances, I went and created a script that held references to each hair style, shirt, and pants, as well as each skin color, hair color, shirt color, pants color, and shoe color. By associating each with a number, it became possible to determine a single string sequence describing what appearance the generated character had, and therefore save it and re-generate it later.
Other main aspects I worked on:
Camera Movements
I designed the camera drag movements, as well as the zooming in and out, ensuring the correct fade in and out depending on the zooming level.
Ship Design
Over 200 individual sprites were created for the ship, its individual parts, the room tiles, obstacles and decoration, each drawn and placed by hand. I also, with inputs and advice from the rest of the team of course, was in charge of the shape of the ship, and the room layout.
Background
The parallax effect of the background flying under was also a personal design, accompanied by scripts allowing to set different speeds for different contexts, or set the time as day or night. This section initially accounted for generating random elements in the background such as islands, or shipwrecks, but priorities were set elsewhere at the end of development.
Post-Mortem :
This project was a huge success for me, at least in terms of visual polish. With great work on the UI side of things, which is extremely important for management games, the game truly feels largely above all my previous projects in terms of appearance. It even allowed me to assemble a large amount of exportable sprite and custom scripts, which could be used elsewhere or even made public on their own.
However, gameplay-wise, the game is lacking. Though it has potential, and lots of interesting mechanics, as of the end of the class project and its submission, it simply isn't a very enjoyable experience. The events and needs of passengers don't feel like they matter as much as they should, the game alternates between periods where nothing happens, and periods where everything seems to happen at once, and overall it feels like the player is a victim of whatever happens rather than the cause, or the savior.
Something is missing in the way we designed the gameplay to make it truly interesting to experience. If the moment lends itself to it, I would very much like to revisit it and attempt to make it work better.
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