What I Learned

Procedural planet generation using isosphere geometry, storytelling in a completely dynamic universe through events and objectives

Description

Our Space Exploration Game (aka “Spation”) puts the player on a ship alone in a completely procedural universe. Through we never completed the story, the idea was the player was sent to explore a wormhole near Earth and was teleported far out into an unknown galaxy. Guided by the onboard computer system, the player must complete a series of missions and survive events such as alien ship attacks to figure out how to get home. Since the game started out as merely a tiny solar system generator, the first challenge we faced was making the game interested. We quickly found that it was fun to be able to fly in and out of planets as well as collect resources from them. However, we needed a way to tell our story in a universe which was different every time so I created a system which used a list of events which the player would progress through. These events could be things like reach a certain planet, collect resources from a planet, or even kill enemy ships. Though the game was never completed, we enjoyed working through the various challenges of a completely procedural world.