Space Trip

“Save an astronaut from losing their oxygen while experiencing a psychedelic trip through mind and space.”

This was the first project I got to work on at The Game Assembly. Space Trip was made over the span of six weeks going from a concept to a fully fledged game using the Unity game engine.

We wanted to combine the Teensie Highways of Rayman 3 with the gameplay loop of Race The Sun to create a trippy experience through space.

My Responsibilities

  • Implementation of player animations using the Unity Blendtree

  • Checkpoints and respawning of Player and Pickups

  • Speed pickups

  • Seamless level transitions using blendshapes and asynchronous level loading.

Seamless Transitions

The most fun and interesting feature I got to implement was the seamless transitions between the levels.

While implementing the transitions I encountered two big problems. How could we pull off a black hole that expands from a small point and then tears open from the middle and how do I ensure that the levels load fast enough without any lagspikes?

Making the black hole expand and tear open wasn’t as hard as it seemed. After discussing it with graphical artist Alexander Ekengren we came to the conclusion that we should use blendshapes in order to manipulate and warp the 3D model to our liking, with the help of the Unity documentation I was able to easily change the blending value of the blendshapes based on it’s distance from the player. This combined with some code to rotate the black hole resulted in the effect of a massive black hole that appears and expands right in front of your eyes.

In order to ensure that the player still animated correctly while loading between levels I had to load the levels asynchronously. The problem we encountered was that when changing between levels the game lagged as we had to load in the music. This resulted in me having to brainstorm with programmer David Nilsson to get his stem based music system to work with my level transitions, this resulted in us settling on implementing a loading screen at the beginning of the game in order to pre-load all the music at the start of the game meaning that we didn’t have to load any of it during gameplay.