Lunar Express

Gameography

Genre: Side-scroller, Tone: Lighthearted, quirky,
Description: A ā€œbeat-the-clockā€ game set in a futuristic space train.

Project

My Roles

  • Producer: Managed a team of five (+ artist, two programmers, composer)
  • UI Designer: Designed and programmed splash screen, main menu, opening narrative sequence, and closing win condition screen.
  • Writer: Created the main character, wrote the backstory, opening narrative sequence, win condition text, and all publishing copy including logline and synopsis.

Skills Utilized

  • Narrative Writing (Microsoft Word)
  • Project Management (Trello)
  • Team Collaboration and Management (Discord)
  • In-engine Development (Godot Engine)
  • Programming (GDScript)
  • UI / UX (Figma)
  • Graphic Design (Adobe Photoshop)

Violet has locked herself in the back of her space train, and needs to get to the front before it implodes, so... huh?

SYNOPSIS

Violet de Mercury is a space and time traveler collecting things all over the galaxies, but a mere routine cleanup has gone terribly awry when a chip from an asteroid blasts her space train. Now each car is locked, the locomotive's speed is lowering, and once it hits zero, swoooosssshhhā€”it no longer exists.

Watching Johnny Carson on her 1950s Earthling television set is now out of the question as she must collect passcards and progress car after car towards the conductor's station, and step on the 31st century equivalent of gas.

This title was developed for the 59th edition of the nine-day Godot Wild Jam.

Gallery

Main menu: With the artist's illustration in-hand, I stylistically matched the tone and integrated font, icons, and functionality to start the game, access the settings menu, adjust the volume, see the credits and controls, and exit the game. Controls screen: Ahead of creating the controls screen, I gathered the graphics and adjusted them to match the colour palette of the game. Opening narrative: I wrote, programmed, and animated the opening narrative sequence. Game design: As the game design process became too unwieldy for other developers and resulted in a messy hodge-podge of ideas, I took over the game design and unified it into an achievable, streamlined "beat-the-clock" game. As a result, we finished the game on time and within the revised scope. Win condition screen: I wrote, programmed, and animated the win condition screen over the artist's illustrationā€”ensuring the main character's quirkiness left the player satisfied for completing the game. I led brainstorming sessions, and pitched ideasā€”including for story and game title. Despite the nine-day dev cycle, I drafted a game design document to ensure that all teammates were aware of what we were building. I created and managed tasks on Trello for the team, ensuring that progress was visual for motivation, and all information discussed in our Discord server was centralized.

UI Design

Splash Screen, Main Menu, Opening Narrative

Game Design Document

Lunar Express: GDD (PDF Download)