Moon is Not the Limit
Cellec Games
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
I was able to contribute in this project from start to finish. Moon is Not the Limit is an educational game that teaches you about space and space travel. This game went through some drastic design decision changes during development, however we were able to pull through and finish everything neatly.
Contributions:
Level Design
Encyclopedia mechanic
Gameplay Systems
Level Sequences
Level Design
One of the first tasks that I contributed with was to make an “Earth level”, a level that contained the launchpad for the rocket to launch off. After the launchpad was finished, I was able to work on the hangar and the environments surrounding the launchpad. We also decided to add gameplay in the hangar so I ended up in charge of making the building and the important rooms in it. I was able to place the locations of the rooms and modeled where all the triggers and travel-able places would be, and then an artist was able to put all the furniture in. There was a simple space level already created shortly before I joined the team, I was able to use it and add all the planets, moon, sun, and another version of the planet earth.
Solar System Encyclopedia
This was my first system to create for MINL. To be able to answer a lot of the educational questions asked during gameplay, players could study the encyclopedia and gained insight and information about planets, moons, and the sun through this mechanic.
Even though it was one of the first things that were created for the game, it did not get added until the final stages of development. Originally you were supposed to be able to access this system with the pause menu, allowing the player to read during gameplay. However that idea was scrapped because it would be too easy to answer questions, so it was placed in the main menu as an additional level for the player to learn.
Journey Select
This system serves as a level select, allowing the player to commit to a journey before launching off to outer space. It was mostly a lot of UI work and making sure that the player retained a lot of the information that was saved while confirming their destination.
Systems
This is where a lot of my programming skills came into play (Blueprints and C++)
Rocket Select
Rocket selector came next. In this mode, the player is able to select from 3 different rockets with different stats. Besides the UI, I was also in charge of animating the rocket parts from dismantled state to a built state. Again the system needed to save the information based on the player choice.
Landing Select
A bit more different this time, with the landing picker, players were able to rotate the moon using mouse rotation and hover over the highlighted spots for information about the landing. The system itself wasn’t hard to implement but the lighting around the moon was. Since everything in this level was on a very large scale, all the lighting actors were too weak to add proper lighting to the moon, what I ended up doing was creating a very small moon and just focusing the camera very close to give it a bigger form.