Interstellar Ella:
Project Kosmos
Created for the international TV series "Interstellar Ella" by Fabrique Fantastique.
This game is designed for children between the ages of 6 and 9 and attempts to seamlessly combine adventure with educational content. It is available on the Ketnet site for PC as well as on the Ketnet application for mobile devices.
My responsibilities :
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Coded game features.
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Coded workflow improving tools.
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Created accessibility features.
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Created general systems.
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Designed & blocked out levels.
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Implemented art into levels.
Creating Levels
The challenge with the level design and blockouts was that the game itself had multiple modes of play.
This meant that I had to tackle designing multiple levels
all varying quite a lot from each other.
On top of that, the target audience were 6-9 year old children.
A category in which it's not strange for some
to not be used to playing videogames, not to mention
the difficulty that is built into the game itself.
Improving Workflow
Scene 'A' being used to generate prefabs
Big levels are prone to crashing due to memory issues on browsers.
Thus our levels had to be split into pieces and loaded in at runtime.
Said process is mostly boring, long, manual work,
hence I created a tool to automate the process.
The tool creates an asset from the scene, gives it an appropriate name with a designated folder and leaves the scene that was used untouched.
This way you could have scene 'A' be a full representation of the level
with all the bells and whistles attached.
On the other hand we have an empty scene 'B', which is used in the actual build, as this one will load the assets created from 'A'.
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The single manual labor one has to do, is to use transparent cubes to designate the size of a piece.
The cube one has to size and position
Accessibility Features
Due to the target audience being what it was, there existed a great gap in the skill levels of the players,
and one of the gameplay mechanics included fast-paced movement with many jumps the player had to make.
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Many of these jumps were too difficult and had the potential to make the experience a frustrating one. I created additional logic
to solve this issue.
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This resulted in an asset that could :
1) automate the jump (no user input required).
2) simulate a perfect jump to a desired location.
3) let you customize the gravity which would temporarily affect the player during the perfect jump (will affect the arc made).
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