Long Way To Earth
A Narrative Spaceship Management Game.
      •  Context: Rubika 4th year
      •  Role: Lead Designer
      •  Period: November 2023 - January 2024
      •  Engine: Unity
Game Pitch
"Through an unexpected turn of events, your freighter spaceship has been tasked with delivering an alien artifact to Earth. Manage your workers and your resources to survive this long haul. Your success might change the course of the war."
This narrative management project challenged me to use a systemic approach in designing the narrative and challenges.
Creative Direction
Concept Creation. I proposed the concept with my programmer friend Sacha Villecroze as part of my fourth year game project. We took on a top-down approach, thinking about a strong storyline and events inspired by our love for space movies and shows like Ad Astra, Interstellar and Cowboy Bebop.
From Idea to Mechanics. After drafting out the main story idea, we settled on a worker placement mechanic that would allow for varied storylines and intricated systems. Each character has their strengths and weaknesses, that you can discover by assigning them to various tasks.
From Mechanics to Systems. Once the mechanic was defined, we designed a series of systems to support it and provide challenges based on it: course correction, food production, energy distribution...

The Main Ship Interface

Narrative Design & Writing
Narrative System. I designed the Task System as an all-purpose feature, allowing the player to input different workers to get a different story outcome. In addition to the Task Window's text, Dialogue Bubbles show the consequences of these choices on the crew members.
Designing the Crew. Each crew member was designed to have a mechanical purpose: specialists and Jacks-of-all trade, easily demotivated or very resilient... The characters' backstories and personalities were designed with this and mind, and their relationships can affect the state of a task and the resulting dialogue.
Writing a Systemic Narrative. I wrote the story as the tale of a clash between the morale of the crew and the importance of the mission. During the game, the player will make choices between the two 'factions' within the ship, by assigning members of either faction to tasks of high responsibility.

The Task System allows the player to make choices and the dialogue bubbles react to these choices.

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