Yuning "Anona" Yang

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Star Promise is a survival game for singer player. In Star Promise, players will need to solve problems on their planet and travel through the galaxy to find a better living environment, encountering different people to know about their stories. Players will explore the perspective of choices from helping other people, learning that the best choice in our perspective might not be appropriate for other people.

Reference

Project designed by Unreal Engine (4.27).
Original Soundtrack are made by friend on request.
Skybox materials, the models of buildings and Dialogue Plugin are from UE marketplace.
Characters and planet models are designed by author in Blender and Maya.

Video

Screenshots

Inspiration and Theme

As kids, we always make important choices with the help from parents, choices that we don’t really understand but are said to be “for your good”, feeling confused and afraid when we keep moving forwards, missing out on something that might really matter to us. But when we obtain the right to make choices on our own, we face more problems.

When we are students, we meet friends that we think our friendship can last forever. However, we often find out that they are slowly drifting apart from our lives after graduation. We may be living in different places, doing different jobs, saying that we will always support each other’s dreams, but when we get to meet, we always have no idea how the other one is doing. When we try to support each other, it is hard to find out what is really in need.

Every man is a lonely spaceship, flying through an endless galaxy during his life. We may meet other people along the way, help each other, and have an unforgettable journey together. But everyone has a different destination, no matter how long they’ve been with us, we will ultimately separate into different roads. We can only watch the people around us walk towards their destined outcome, slowly but firmly.

Through Star Promise, I hope to construct a microcosm to display the individuality of human beings. Everyone has their own ideas and choices, even though those may come from their wishes, or from situations under compromise, but in any case, that is under their own will. Even if we believe there could be better choices, it is not in our position to make decision. Most of the time, we can’t do anything about individual differences between people.

Making decision is an important proposition in life and the best way to project the differences between people’s thinking patterns. When we try to help others make decisions, whether it is due to misinterpretation of what others really need, or due to selecting the most appropriate plan in our own mind rather than others’, it is always not that easy.

In Star Promise, we transfer the concept of each person’s world into a small planet, where people can grow plants to obtain energy, just like in the real world to develop their own life, whether it is school or career. In the process, there will be a lot of difficulties, like randomly falling meteorites, in which case the player will have to build defense towers or buy weapons to prevent their planet from being attacked. Just like in real life, we struggle to survive with difficulties after difficulties. The different choices made by different players also symbolize the different ways that different people might respond to similar situations, which may also lead to different outcomes.

It is worth mentioning that Star Promise concludes many stories of choices through the journey players take to other planets. On those planets, players will encounter different NPCs that are facing a life-changing problem. Players will need to choose a way to help them, but whichever they choose, they will find the NPCs have their own perspective of making decisions. Though the players’ help might somehow improve the situation, they will still watch the NPCs walking towards their destined future. The options of providing help are limited due to the form of game, but the limited options might be the truth that we didn’t realize as we see limited world in our own perspective.

Game Background

AD 6274, radiation pollution invaded the Island Galaxy and is getting worse as time gone by, the living environment of human was seriously eroded. Plants hardly survived, rare diseases being found, gravity disoriented, planetary rotation interfered, there are planets exploding all the time, causing lots of debris keep floating through the universe. As they fall into the planets, explosions further destroy the living environment. The remaining humans either await the end of the world on the planet they inhabit or be driven away by radiation in search of new habitats.

Player will start the game from the perspective of Munisa Vangel, a girl whose father was an engineer and mother a botanist. Player will find her parents have left the planet for a long time and set off her journey to find them.

Survival System Design

Obtaining Energy

Players will spawn on their planet at the beginning of the game. There, players need energy to survive, which can be obtained by planting energy plants at the rate of 1 unit per day per plant. Everyday players need 2 units of energy for food and maintaining vitals.

Meteorite Damage

As stated in the game background, debris of planet crashed into remaining planets, causing damage on the planet. In the game, debris are being generated by a possibility of 30%. As time passed by, the possibility will increase to 70% on the day 4, urging the player to explore other planets.

The randomly generated meteorite will be displayed by its damage amount and coming days on the left of the screen, which will be arranged by the coming days, so that players can prepare defense by adding shield energy or constructing weapon in advance.

The planet has a shield in defending the damage. When the meteorite gets to its coming date, and if its damage amount hasn’t reduced to 0 by weapon, the shield energy will be reduced by corresponding damage amount shown in the list. If the shield doesn’t have enough energy, the shield energy will be reduced to 0, and a random item placed on the planet will be destroyed by the meteorite.

Constructing Defense System

Players can spend energy to construct defense system to reduce meteorite damage:

• Weapon: reduce 20 units of damage from the top meteorite arranged in the list every day. Price: 3 units of energy.
• Weapon Aoe: reduce 5 units of damage from all meteorites in the list every day. Price: 5 units of energy.
• Shield Generator: add 5 shield energy every day. Price: 5 units of energy.

These will be displayed in the shop on the right top corner of the screen together with energy plant. Except the above description, there are specific algorithms that allow players to explore the upper limit of their defense system:

• Algorithm of Weapon Attack: When the player constructs weapons in specific formation, the amount of damage hit on meteorites will be increased by corresponding percentage.
• Algorithm of Shield Defense: When the player constructs shield generators in specific formation, the amount of damage hit by the meteorites will be decreased by corresponding percentage.

Special Items

As players travel to different planets, they will encounter special items that help advance the stories, for example: spaceship and seeds. These items will be displayed in special shop with price if appropriate.

Story Interaction Design

Star Promise consists of several stories that are about choices with different perspectives, where the first one is about Lytt, a girl who is seriously sick because of the radiation. Player will have choices of producing medicine and finding habitable planets to help delay Lytt’s condition. Whichever the player chooses, Lytt’s days are numbered, but she hopes her father can leave their planet and live a new life without her. Player would try to persuade her father but fail in the end because her father has his family to mourn.

Only this first story is displayed in this game demo. In later stories, the player will encounter similar choices and explore the choices made in her own family along the way. And the player will find out the truth of the radiation at the end.

Production Process

Blueprints

Dialogue

Animation

3D Models

Design Sketch

Music

Original soundtrack made by Zihan Zhou, Composition major from Berklee College of Music.

There are five tracks in total:

1. Start Animation: highlight the apocalyptic atmosphere caused by the radiation
2. “Silence” on Planet 0: emphasize the loneliness players would immerse in as the game starts
3. Flying Animation: display the emptiness of the universe
4. “Calm” on Planet A: show the sadness due to Lytt’s impending death
5. “Fireworks” for the ending of story on Planet A: show the contrast between the grandeur of fireworks and the loneliness of death

All the music in this project has the same descending perfect fifth groups as the motive. We used oboe and flute group and the violins harmonic to create the buzzer sound, in order to show the emptiness and silence in the space. In the last piece “Fireworks”, we inversed the motive to create the resolving feeling. Overall, we used only the basic dramatic scoring technique to create a simple, calm, and lonely feeling for the players to enhance the theme of the game.

Future Plan

1. Add more distinctive choice options that emphasize on different values. Refine the algorithms for weapons and defense systems and integrate the player’s gameplay in this part into the stories of NPCs, while utilizing the defensive index (probability to generate weapons or plants) designed in the system to simulate NPC’s actions and tendency of making decisions. So the NPCs’ behavior will be displayed in a clear tendency but with more flexibility, which can create diverse experiences for players.
2. Scripts of the rest stories and refine the storyline of Munisa (player’s perspective). This will extent the stories of choices into a long term exploration of differences in perceptions, leaving a deeper impression of the theme to the players.
3. Setting refinement. The radiation keeps increasing as time goes by. There will be a hidden value that describes how much the player is influenced by the radiation, which will be determined by how long the player stays in radiation-affected planets and how far the player is away from the source of radiation. The value will influence the behaviors of the player if it goes too high and indirectly influence the ending of the whole story. This will determine the difficulty level of reaching the true end and create a challenge for players to explore.
4. Follow-up refinement of modeling and other visual display, especially personalized movements to characters, animation for fireworks and illustrations for Fireworks Star. Voice acting of dialogue and personalized sound effects.