Angry AstronAUt

Overview

Angry Astronaut is a fast-paced top-down dungeon crawler where the player has to blast through numerous enemies while navigating through an infested space ship to rescue his loved one. It is a cross-disciplinary project between designers and artists which mirrors the rigours of a conventional game production cycle across multiple teams. It is one of my proudest works, surpassing even my own expectations towards the end.

Fundamentally, I wanted Angry Astronaut to be a fun, engaging experience at its core. From competitive analysis, my team agreed that while simple, a fast-paced shooter would set us apart from the more methodical platformers and puzzle games from our peers. We also loved the design of hypercasual games where players can just drop in and immediately pick up where they left off for a quick burst of action.

We drew heavy inspiration from similar indie titles such as Enter the Gungeon and Soul Knight, picking apart their designs to figure out what makes them tick. We focused on a core gameplay loop of fluid run and gun gameplay, looking to maintain a smooth yet action-packed pace to guide players through the dungeon crawler flowstate. We learnt that many secondary factors also contributed to the dynamics of the game. For instance, our enemies would behave differently depending on the structure of our level design, which in turn shape how players choose to approach various encounters.

Polish

A personal learning point for me during Angry Astronaut's development was the impact that little bits of polish add to liven up the game. As I designed its core systems, gameplay felt hollow with just the bare implementation. I sought to tweak the small details where I could, learning along the way. From simple camera shakes to environmental lighting, damage visuals to projectile physics, each little detail I pushed into the game enhanced its gameplay feedback contributed greatly to the punchy experience I intend to craft.

Unity Production

This was the first major project on the Unity platform for most of the team. I anticipated that we would need to be agile in production given our relative inexperience, and stepped up to set the pace, spearheading the design and programming of the prototype. I fell into the lead role naturally as my teammates looked to me for direction. It was challenging  as I was also juggling with figuring out complex Unity functions new to me, and did not always have a clear answer for the direction of the game.

The production process was eye-opening to me. As a self-directed person, I had always preferred to have individual control over every aspect of a project to ensure a high bar of quality myself. The scope of Angry Astronauts taught me that I had to be flexible and be confident in my team's ability to execute. I can focus on the foundational mechanics of the experience, but I do not have the bandwidth to manage each secondary element. I learnt to understand my team's dynamics and delegate work according to each member's strengths, while maintaing a strong core everyone can rally around.