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Play as the planet Saturn in a physics-defying match to reclaim your power stolen by the arrogant Jupiter, and win the game alongside your interstellar allies!
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Action, narration, roguelite-like
Unity
March - June 2024
6 people (solo Game Designer)
Ace of Saturn - Walkthrough
NARRATIVE DESIGN & WRITING
One of the first things I did was make character sheets for our cast of characters.
The intent was for me and my team to settle on the characters’ personality, as well as to help with the casting of the voice actors and to give them direction on the type of performance I wanted.
Making the storyboard above allowed me to iterate with the pacing and the development of the characters’ emotions.
More than writing the outline of the story and its storyboard, I also wrote all the dialogue and the in-game barks.
My goal was to show the explosive personality of our characters, but also for the player to feel connected with the intensity of the ongoing match.
To avoid ear fatigue, I calibrated the barks so that some would occur more frequently than others. This results in “common” and “rare” barks. I wanted to surprise people, manage to make them smile, to encourage re-plays.
MECHANICS DESIGN
I molded the game’s mechanics after the basics of its narrative design: hence why all of the characters have a moveset that’s in harmony with their personality.
Mercury’s aid is the first I designed. I wanted it to be a ‘defensive’ aid that would be used by the less skilled of our players; but it also needed to be juicy and powerful, and make the player feel like their success was due to their own skill and not just a simple button press.
Below, this excerpt of my Excel sheet for the signs and feedbacks were used to guide our VFX artist and our sound designer in their work.
The mock-ups on the left were used to illustrate my vision of where the three basic shots would land on the map to the programmer.
Those below were used to explain the lob shot’s behavior in a concise storyboard.
INTERFACE
I prototyped and designed mock-ups of the ‘choose your ally’ screen, as well as wrote its text.
At first, all the specials of the secondary characters were presented to the player like trading cards that they would have to pick and choose.
Then, because I wanted to highlight the character designs and the surprise aspect that came with seeing a new character we’d never seen before, I reduced the options to two characters maximum, with the half of the screen taken by the character to emphasize on their power.
Final in-game version of the ‘choose your ally’ screen.
More than designing and writing the text for the tutorial in the options menu, I also integrated it in Unity, as well as coded the key re-binding system.
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