Celestial Voyager
Celestial Voyager is a mobile single-person space adventure puzzle game in which player guides a spaceship safely to its refueling destination, using as little fuel as possible. The player can either tap and drag on the screen to control the thruster and guide the spaceship to change direction, which uses a considerable amount of fuel. Or, the player can take advantage of the gravitational pull of intermediary planets en route to their destination; for example, by leveraging planetary gravitational forces to slingshot around the planet while heading towards the intended direction. Every planet has gravitational pull depending on its size, which gets stronger the closer the ship gets to it. Hence, the player needs to be able to correctly channel the right amount of power at the right time for the spaceship to navigate safely.
Team
Hang Yang
Nancy Kwong
Stephanie Oey
Viet Phan
Zehao Eric Huang
Role
Team Player
Research
Concept Development
UX & Visual Design
User Testing
Design Process
We were asked to design a game of our interest for our Game Design class, so the team came together to discuss the genre and types of game we would like to develop. After several meeting and discussion, we finally decided to build a space themed game that basically asks the user to skillfully navigate a spaceship with a limited amount of fuel while using gravitational force of the surrounding planets to make the journey through the cosmos possible.
Key Features
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Voyage during a fuel crisis
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Avoid dangerous flying objects
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Use physics advantageously
Early Iteration
Based on what we previously defined and some user research, I came up with this flow map of possible features and after several rounds of discussions and meetings with the team, I finally came up with the following layouts for the UI.
Playtest
Getting feedback from users is the best way to test if the game is intuitive and fun from the users' perspectives. Since our playtesters for the game were members of MDM class of Cohort 12, this meant that there was a bias with regards to the tester population as they all have knowledge of game design and testing procedures.
However, within this group, there was still a large mix of demographics:
● The group included playtesters who have played our game, as well as those who have not played our game before.
● Out of the 25 playtesters, only 5 had previously tried our game (20%)
● The group included a combination of casual mobile gamers, console gamers, as well as people who do not usually play games.
● The group included a mix of adult men (60%) and women (40%).
Final product
After rounds of user testing and multiple iterations through the semester, we created a game that runs well on Apple IOS platform and people can have a bit taste of space travel while interacting with the game.
