Involvement: Dec 2017 - Jul 2020
Tools: Unity3D
Status: Unreleased
Developer: Double Dog Games
- Wide variety of enemies to date, from astrogeologists to interdimensional beings
- Unique battle partner system to fight alongside your favorite cuties in battle
- Arcade shooter goodness that’s accessible to any fan
- An inclusive approach to gender and sexuality, including non-binary, trans, female, and male romance
- Take your enemies on romantic dates, such as to the bar or the observation deck
Pre-Alpha Gameplay
Often design decisions would manifest from the team. I would frequently encourage our artists and programmers to share their thoughts. Empathy for team members is the key for supporting them, so they can bring out their genius. This yielded many great decisions.
One thing I really pushed for throughout development was reusability and modular code. I knew that making things component-based was going to save us a lot of headaches later down the line. We used the scriptable object system in Unity to help us create a content creation pipeline for our visual novel framework that linked up with Ink (the narrative scripting engine from Inkle).
This is a clip of some game jam gameplay. Deep Space Donuts was originally for the Game Makers Toolkit↗ Game Jam run by Mark Brown. At that time, the visual novel component wasn’t present.
We struggled a bit to find the right format to display dialogue and facial expressions while the player was traveling in space. We landed on this design because it gave the most visibility to see facial expressions. Tate, the convict, was to be shared between ships, so this format also covered that functionality.
When you’re working with multiple artists, it’s necessary to have style guides to maintain a cohesive art direction in your game. Here’s an example guide I collaborated on with my lead character artist.
I advocated for accessibility features when I first started gathering a team around this project. For example, when we got to dialogue boxes I made sure to have text size options.
Our artist Tara helped flesh out our dating sim story beats through storyboards. The annotation [1-2A] refers to a corresponding line of dialogue in our Ink script.
Playtesting and gathering user feedback data was always a treat (and quite helpful)! Real-time feedback is invaluable. Being able to have a conversation and connect with players allows you to dig down on complicated nuances that you couldn’t get from an online form. Feedback was processed via spreadsheets.
When you’ve had a team together for so long, you start to build up a mental knowledge base. Not everything makes it into documentation. Proper onboarding is great for mitigating knowledge loss. Team members coming and going can cause a lot of turbulence. You have to be very careful not to unbalance things. I was able to keep morale, overall direction, and structure over a number of different team changes.