Spaceflower (2021): Katharina Broswik (Game Design, Art), Nic Schilling (Music)
A snake-like game about avoiding obstacles in space.
Responsibilities: Game Design, 2D Pixel Art, Code
Duration: November 2021, 1 weekend.
Solo Game Jam Project + composer person. Unity Engine.
Tools: Unity Engine, Aseprite
Quick jump: My work on the project
Title: Spaceflower
Developer: StumbleDuck, Nic S.
Genre: Snake, Arcade
Price: free
Release (itch.io): 07.11.2021
The Game
A small seed finds itself on a strange planet and tries to escape. ‘Where to?’ you ask? Up, of course! But where is ‘up’ in space?
Try growing as far as you can and avoid space debris on your way to the top, while fighting against the ever growing speed of your own motion.
How far can you go?
The Project
The game was created during Franken Game Jam 2021 in Bayreuth with the help of Nic Schilling, who composed the beautifully minimalistic retro game music for Spaceflower. The theme of the game jam was “Growth”.
Game Design
Since the theme of the game jam was “growth”, my immediate association was some kind of plant. I also wanted the gameplay to be as minimalistic as it could be and so thought of the game Snake: a classic game played on early mobile phones and despite – or perhaps just because – its minimalism very fun to play. So my aim was to create a game design that merges the gameplay loop of Snake with some kind of growing plant.
The gameplay of Spaceflower revolves around a player controlled flower bud that is constantly growing – one step at a time – with the goal to grow up as far as possible. The body of the plant then streches right along the path where the bud has been the steps before, creating a slithering line across the screen, just as in Snake. Additionally there are obstacles blocking the way up, so the player has to carefully move around those and at the same time make sure not to cross the own body of plant, for the game is lost at collision with either one of those. The player challenge at this point is movement planning to avoid obstacles and the own body.
To add some variety to this strong base of Snake gameplay, I decided to make the screen move down constantly, creating more urgency. With moving the screen in one direction (down) I send a clear message to the player: you have to go up! This message is delivered without words, just through gameplay i.e. the game world. The screen and player character additionally move faster the longer the run is going on. Faster movement with each time step is also part of Snakes game design, although the screen in the classic mobile game remains static. So this adds another challenge to the gameplay: fast decisionmaking and reaction time.
Lastly, I added collectibles to the game world that spawn alongside the obstacles coming from the top of the screen. With collecting the small bubbles the player can slow down the game again, which makes navigation and reacting a lot easier and thus enables the player to persevere even longer, meaning getting a new best time for the run. This feature also constitutes a dynamic difficulty adjustment the player can trigger themselves, adjusting just how difficult the challenge should be. This feature, next to reinforcing the challenges of decision making and planning, also poses the challenge of balancing the own gameplay experience through difficulty.
2D pixel art
For creating the pixel art of Spaceflower I chose a minimalistic color palette of 4 colors, two signal colors and two background colors: 
The pink color is used for obstacles and the flowers, the green color is the main color for the character (a plant) and the collectibles. The game world – just as the movement – is tilebased, the size of a single tile is 8×8 pixel.
To add even more sprinkles of cute fun little flowers will emerge when the player moves along the own plant body, connecting the stalks that came before. When the game ends the player is greeted with a big blooming flower, right where the bud collided to its end.
Code
As can be seen in the GIF above I implemented parallax scrolling for the background layer, to add a little more depth. This also has a space-y effect, kind of having a galaxy of stars floating by in the background. To achieve endless scrolling of the background it is gradually put together at the top of the screen with the Unity RuleTile functionality of choosing a random tile of a collection with a specific noise value (seen on the right). This results in connected fields of tiles without really being noisy, as you can see in the GIF and every screenshot here.
Portfolio of Katharina Broswik 