Bianca Poroliseanu

Terisa’s Vengeance was a mission I concepted and brought most of the way to ship before handing it off to another designer to complete due to time constraints and expanded resources.

Similarly to Through Enemy Lines, we were given a basic prompt for the mission and it was on myself and my writer to come up with gameplay and story to flesh things out. This mission in particular was a challenge because it was the lead in to the climax, and as a result was one of the biggest and most important to get right.

Video Source: GamerJGB

Rally the New Republic was a mission I took from concept and only partly through to ship before handing it off to another designer due to time constraints and expanded resources.

The challenge with this mission was that it was meant to act as an opportunity for complex support play. The player was locked into playing the support ship, and our gameplay goal was to take them from tutorialization to mastery of this ship since this was end game. Like the other missions, we were given a basic story prompt and the writer and I went to work fleshing out the rest.

Video Source: GamerJGB

Through Enemy Lines was a mission I took from concept all the way through to ship.

We were given a basic prompt when we started designing about this being a mission in Deep Space about ferrying a captured Star Destroyer to a rebel base, but an engine complication causes it to fall out of hyperspace. From there I worked closely with my writer to flesh out the narrative further and seamlessly marry it with fun and engaging gameplay.

Video Source: GamerJGB

Screenshots of what our levels look like in-game. Originally there were no obstacles in any of the scenes. For visual aesthetic as well as design reasons, we decided to include boxes and other items to fill out the space a bit more and make it feel lived-in, as well as to allow for more interesting traversal through the level.

This is ultimately what our levels looked like. We cut them down to 6 from 9, due to technological and time limitations, with the implication through UI elements that the game could be expanded on to later include the cut levels and environments.

At this stage in the design process we had just decided to expand beyond our three levels that we had after cutting the greenhouse and loading bay. The idea became that we would continuously cycle through the same three KillZones (The Airlock, UV Filter and Rocket), but the difficulty and complexity would increase gradually each time, so that the player would have to take an already familiar situation and approach it slightly differently. Our level count grew from 3 to 15, and we decided to separate the replaying of the levels into Chapters. The designs of the last 3 levels for Chapter 5 weren’t even finished before we realised that 15 levels might be a bit much. We cut them down from 15 to 9, and from 5 Chapters to 3.

These were the very first versions of the levels during PreProduction, back when we had 5 distinct environments we wanted to build. On top of the airlock room/foyer, UV filter/Relaxation Room, and the Rocket Chamber, we had also intended on creating a Greenhouse where the Colonists would be killed by corrosive pesticides, as well as a Loading Bay, where forklifts would push large, heavy boxes on Colonists. Due to time contraints, these last 2 ideas were iceboxed in favour of the more unique and space-esque deaths.