JACKY XU

2D Artist | Game Designer


star Chaser



Exploration Game About Finding Stars



Objective: Secret Santa Jam

Role: Everything

Time: 3 weeks (2020)

Team size: Solo

Tools: Unity 3D, Photoshop, Aseprite, Trello



Star Chaser is a narrative exploration game where player explores an undiscovered planet without light, in hopes of tracking down a rare star. In pitch darkness, player must track down and collect star shards, in order to create light to explore deeper into the planet and its secrets. Download via itch.io below or click here.



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Design Highlights



Light Exploration



In order to venture deeper into the pitch-black open world, player must strategically place/throw lanterns that provide light, leaving behind a trail in explored places.



Item Guided Navigation



Using the star tracker, players can seek resources for crafting light, in turn guiding them along the open world and its narrative.



Gameplay Driven Narrative



Constant conversations with the player character Dani’s friend back home inform the player of their objective, while deepening the world mysteries.



Design Process



Given the limitations of the Secret Santa Jam, Star Chaser was built around the idea of narrative exploration. Below are some design sketches of the game in early stages focused on brainstorming the use of light and tracking in an open world environment. Later sketches focus on UI design with light interaction, and level designs.



Initial brainstorming notes/sketches of the tracker feature.



UI and item system sketches.



Level beat-map planning.



Level and puzzle design sketches.



Tracker tracking planning and debugging.



Visual Design



The player plays as Dani, a witty explorer, on comms with their crew mate Marcus throughout the game. Dani’s designed to be agile, while fully equipped for whatever awaits during her adventures. Star Chaser lets players explore a forgotten planet, preciously inhabited by a civilization over 1000 years ago. The environment hints at what once was an advanced and populated civilization fallen into ruins with its crumpling architecture and overgrown vegetation. Below are some concept art and pixel art assets used in-game.



Concept art of character, environment, and UI.



Introduction sequence and tilemap assets.



Environment and item assets.



Character, UI, and animation assets.



Narrative/Gameplay Pacing



Inspired by traditional script writing, the Star Tracker Game Script organizes the game’s cutscenes, gameplay moments, and dialogue (using Yarn Spinner) as game beats that can be quickly referred to during development. This also allows for convenient edits when changes are necessary after testing in Unity. Below is the Star Tracker Game Script.





Mini Postmortem



Star Chaser was created for the Secret Santa Jam given the prompt “exploration narrative game”. Although it received many positive feedbacks, it received just as many criticisms from peers and upon self-reflection. Below are a few notable lessons.



Successes



The most common positive feedback I received was on Star Chase’s charming tone. Time invested in polishes such as the character portraits and text animations turned out to be essential for the appeal of a narrative game. Combined with the pixel art style, the aesthetics and atmosphere were able to better pull players into the journey and keep them engaged.


Another popular comment I got was that Star Chaser has potential. The completed light and teleportation lanterns proved to be engaging thanks to their ability to alter and traverse environments as players explored them. Given the sandbox nature of the open world and varied lantern types, I’ve only scratched the surface in its use cases for puzzles and storytelling. However, ‘potential’ also implies the current bare-bones state of the game, which leads me to my failures.



Failures



My biggest failure is over scoping. Given the longer than usual 1-month timeframe of the game jam, I grossly overestimated my project scope, resulting in a game demo rather than a complete package. I knew I wanted to make an open-world game, yet I had no real experience completing one. This led me to believe using tilemap and pixel art will allow me to create small sized open game worlds quickly. In reality, the assets and plans required to create an interesting game world worthy of exploring of any scale, takes a considerable amount of time. Furthermore, small features such as lantern collisions that allows an open game world to function adds up and became a huge undertaking. For future projects, I’ve learned to prioritize better design planning completing alpha builds that utilizes final art and designs.


Despite being the core mechanic, some of the light utilities can be completely ignored as the darkness wasn’t restrictive. Since there’s no punishment for being in darkness, the player can freely walk around and pickup/drop lanterns rapidly. There’s never a need to throw the light for exploration given that there’s no danger ahead. This should have been an obvious loophole had I done more early testing with smaller levels that are representative of end state of the game, yet it ended up being a major oversight.



Screenshots and Levels