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ASIMo-V

"In the event of an emergency, locate your nearest Asimo unit for guidance."

Description

You are ASIMo-V, one of five robotic units assigned to a research station in the solar system. 

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Originally a prototype for a different senior class, ASIMo-V started out as a game based on sound-puzzles. After the senior class transitioned to developing a separate game, our team decided to make it the main project of our other senior class.

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This game is meant to be a showcasing of our team's ability to rapidly prototype and build with an unfamiliar engine and create a unique experience for players. This page breaks down what I did on the game, our design process, and a short walkthrough of the first level.

Description

My Roles

Because of the small size of our team, we all shared roles. Mine included the following:

Project Manager

I gave presentations to the class and instructor, checked on teammate status, and wrote sprint reports on the status of the game.

UI Designer

I designed the aesthetic and theme of the game UI and implemented the menus, designed the look and feel of journals, and made eye-catching animations.

Game Designer

My teammates and I all worked together to develop game mechanics and dynamics. We discussed the pros and cons of each mechanic, and the feasibility of including it the project given our time constraints.

Programmer

I used visual scripting to create blueprints, UI widgets, classes, and level sequences that the player experiences in-game. 

Level Designer

Our team worked together on developing the levels, their progression, teaching mechanics, what challenges the player has to overcome, and the aesthetic of the level. 

2D Designer

I used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to design and create many of the UI and 2D elements of the game, including parts for menus, journals, and icons.

Narrative Designer

I developed the basic story and my teammates helped flesh it out. I also wrote journals, logs, and voice lines the player can read and listen to in-game.

Design Documents

Game Design Document

When we first started designing Asimov, we already had a few core mechanics in mind: a physics pickup system similar to those in Portal and Half-Life, zero-gravity environments for the player to solve interesting puzzles, areas where the player could walk on walls, and a deep narrative for the player to uncover. We wrote up our game doc, and within the first week already had a direction to go.

Art Design Document

With our base mechanics, themes, puzzle types and story figured out, we looked around for visual inspiration for our setting (a futuristic space station) and settled on a semi-retro aesthetic theme and feel. From there, we developed our art doc.

Story Design Document

The basic premise of the game and many of its mechanics were developed around the same time, allowing us to create interesting plots and stories based around mechanics and player actions. We 

My Roles
Design Docs

Levels

Our original design (and ultimate goal) of the game setting is a large space station with multiple sections that the player can travel to. 

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While the station has a total of 9 sections (8 modules on the outside ring and the center command module), we decided to focus on five sections:

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  • Living Quarters

  • Hydroponics Lab

  • Research Lab

  • Engineering 

  • Storage/Command

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Our decision to only have 5 sections instead of doing the full 9 is for a few reasons:

  1. The extra sections are damaged or destroyed by events prior to the start of the game, and are thus locked down.

  2. The sections are either engineering or storage extensions, which we already have levels for.

  3. Given our time scale to work on the project, we can only build, script, and polish so many levels.

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After deciding on the levels to include, we devised our game level progression flow to be the following:

Game Progression.png

The game starts out with linear progression designed to teach the player game mechanics and challenges to expect. The player starts out in the Living Quarters, where they can explore and interact with objects, learn the mechanics, and get a basic feel for the game.

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After passing through several skill gates, they can enter the Hydroponics Lab, where they are further introduced to game mechanics and challenges. After completing the Hydroponics section, the game turns semi-linear while still pointing to a single goal: reach the Command section and send out a distress signal.

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We chose three levels to start out with: the Living Quarters, the Research Lab, and the Hydroponics Lab. Level Progression documents were written up for all three, which we used when designing the levels, their structure, and their challenges.

Level Designs
Narrative & UI

Narrative & UI

As the Narrative Designer, I had the job of writing backstory, creating characters, developing the storyline, and tying in the narrative with tutorials, game mechanics, and objectives, art, and all other aspects of the game.

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Because I also acted as the UI Designer, I made the journal UI that would display the text, relevant information about the user (name, age, affiliation, service number, etc.) along with some animations to make it more appealing to the eye.

Text journals tell two stories: that of a worker on the station, and that of the ASIMo-V unit itself. The first page of the journal is either a warning to station workers, a document detailing some activity, or the personal log of a worker on the station.

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The second page is where it gets interesting. Red text is ASIMo-V's inner dialogue. It's strange, edgy, and poetic - a result of ASIMo-V gaining consciousness and questioning the nature of its reality. 

Journals took the most time artistically to make - I found free vector and image assets (such as the background and moving items) and spent several hours in Photoshop and Illustrator designing the layout and putting the elements together.   

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After carefully placing all the UI elements into Unreal, I animated them with Unreal's built-in animator. I wanted there to be a sense of movement and livelihood to the tablets, as narratively they are the only relation the player has with other characters in the game. Journals and the environment tell the story of Asimov, with the player having to read each one to piece together what happened with the crew. The researchers and engineers who used these tablets ran multiple experiments at a time and needed to keep track of them, so the results are displayed on these tablets.

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It took a while to animate all the elements (the scrolling code was especially tricky because of the blueprinting that goes on behind the scenes), but the end result is a sci-fi journal that appeases the eyes and contributes to the mysteries behind Asimov.

Another significant UI and narrative element of the game I designed and built was the objective system and its UI. Objectives are added and removed from the player's Heads Up Display dynamically and help the player understand what to do and where to go next.

Walkthrough

Currently, the Living Quarters Level is fully playable and features most of our mechanics, such as:

  • Basic Movement (Walk, Jump)

  • Advanced Movement (Zero-G environments, walkable walls)

  • Highlighted objects that players can interact with

  • Journals that can be found and read

  • Power cores that can activate objects and unlock areas

  • Lasers and barriers that must be traversed

Walkthroughs
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