Station Etc.
Station Etc. is a 3D, single-player game where reality is subjective and nothing is as it seems. Players must solve the riddles of the station and see through the eyes of strange creatures to find their way. What they see might not really be there, and what's really there might not be seen- in the eccentric world of Station Etc.!
Made in Unity as a 4th year project for Sheridan College’s Bachelor of Game Design program, the game is a culmination of the user-centric design principles taught during the program, and a practical example of the group’s ability to create an experience that is mindful of onboarding, accessibility, flow, and most importantly fun! There was also a heavy emphasis on industry-standard practices, such as rigorous playtest reporting, market-analysis and promotion, and Agile development.
My Roles
Production, Game Designer, Programming, Level Design, Environmental Artist, Composer
Our team of five was heavily inspired by the story of GoldenEye64’s development, and elected to adopt a non-hierarchical structure to our team, rather allow members to focus on aspects of the game that inspired them to use/grow their skills in meaningful ways. Of course, someone needs to keep the project on track, and I applied my leadership skills to quietly play the role of producer, using Agile development techniques to maintain weekly sprints and develop a product breakdown structure and master schedule for our 8 month development window.
As one of two core game designers on the team, I focused heavily on all aspects of the game’s mechanics, progression, flow, accessibility and scope. This naturally lead to me also taking on the role of practical level designer and programmer to practically implement the designs in Unity. As the project developed and we were ready for art-passes, the team agreed that much of the placeholder art/environments I had used for demonstration had an aesthetic we liked, which organically evolved into my role as environmental artist for the levels I had created. Much of the environments make use of free textures and asset packs arranged inventively, as well as some 2D hand drawn animation I created myself.
The game features a vertically-adaptive soundtrack which I composed myself.
Lessons Learned
Master Production Schedules are important! There were times where the team allowed themselves to get too caught up in week-to-week sprints without taking into consideration the overall schedule. While iteration and experimentation were crucial to the success of this project, I learned a team needs to know when to confirm a feature and focus on its refinement, to avoid endlessly iterating on ideas and allowing the vision of the project to drift away from initial designs.
With that said, Agile development allowed the team the flexibility to quickly produce prototypes for design ideas, playtest them, and decide whether or not to pursue them as key features of the game. It wasn’t difficult to completely throw out ideas that were identified early on to be out of scope, or plain ol’ not fun.
We also had a key design pillar to not include any dialog or written text in the game, relying solely on diagetic onboarding. Based on our multiple playtesting reports, the player response suggested that we succeeded in providing a fun, engaging experience free of any language, however this was a constant challenge and took extra time to craft delicate visual cues to signpost the player into the desired actions/outcomes.
