Spacial Chaos began as a group project at Sheridan College, with the goal of creating a local multiplayer game. We brainstormed several ideas, including a cooperative-competitive board game turned digital, and a DDR inspired game based on typing, seeing who could make the inputs the fastest. These ideas each ran afould of their own sets of problems, and eventually, I proposed and blocked in the original concept, a multiplayer game in which each player’s controls would be broken and distributed between all players, with the effect of making each player’s movement a team effort. 

I designed a custom UI and color selection system from scratch, as well as two game modes, both of which I took through Usability and playtesting with players and volunteers to help discern problems in design and coding and make improvements.

 

I was responsible for all programming and gameplay turning and design for the project. In particular, the most important part of design was to ensure that the controls could be effectively and truly randomized between all controllers. Without the ability, the concept would never get out of the gates. Through development, I did research and familiarized myself with Controller interface for Unity, learning the input and workflow for controller input, and working with arrays and randomization in scripting, in order to hold not only inputs, but colors and other player chosen variables.

Above: Mock-up trailer for Spacial Chaos testing and gameplay.

After the project was complete, I decided to take the project further on my own and redesign the game to make better use of the control scheme. Something that I had noticed in the original design was that players were having a difficult time focusing on and moving all the ships at once, so, taking this information forwards, I redesigned the flow of gameplay to use only one larger ship, rather than four small ones, to helps players better maintain their focus on controlling the ship and helping one another equally. Above: An early shot of the new design.

Again, I took charge of all programming and gameplay design, seeking to resolve the issues that had remained in the original prototype, such as the difficulty of players dropping in and out of gameplay, and the relative confusion of the game’s controls, adding GUI elements to help players identify which parts of the ship they had control over. The game’s visual design was reworked to make use of 3D assets in a 2D plane, as opposed to the purely 2D sprite-based original.

 Above – Gameplay from the Redesigned Beta for Spacial Chaos