spacelines from the far out
(Originally Spaceline Fever)
Gather your friends and cross the galaxy as flight attendants of a spaceship and try to survive asteroids, zero gravity and super demanding alien passengers!
Spaceline Fever is set in outer space, in a fantasy and comic future where humans and aliens co-exist and travel across the galaxy.
The game happens inside the spaceship of a commercial space-airline traveling to Exo Vegas, a casino planet. The players must cooperate with each other to manage its many duties: navigating, maintenance, cleaning, feeding the passengers, and more.
Our team had the idea after discussing the desire to create an experience that would be lighter and funnier than past projects. This desire and our passion for local multiplayer games led us to the path of “party games”, a genre that is basically a local multiplayer game that works with a party environment.
Having games like Overcooked, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Faster The Light and RollerCoaster Tycoon as our main references, and being inspired by the retro-futurism of The Jetsons and the sci-fi satire of Futurama, we came up with Spaceline Fever.
For the gameplay we have decided the levels would have 3 different layout variations for each spaceship, meaning each variation would change the systems' position, and those would be selected randomly by the game, so the player would never know what to expect. I was in charge of creating those variations.
Concept art for one of the spaceships
Screenshot of the game (without its UI) showing one of the variations I created for this spaceship
Your goal in Spaceline Fever is arriving in Exo Vegas, avoiding asteroids in the way and stopping by spaceports to pick up new passengers and fill up your ship’s combustible.
There are three ways for you to lose the game: if your spaceship runs out of gas; if the ship’s health runs out, due to the impact with asteroids and other threats; and if an inspector boards the ship and shuts the company down, which happens if the passengers are unhappy with the service.
The spaceship has many systems in order to work properly, like the gravity generator and the energy reactor, and also some to serve the passengers, like the fridge and laser grill, so you can cook for them. All of those systems, except for the restroom and chairs, can spontaneously break or get damaged with the impact of asteroids, and the players have to fix it. While the restroom doesn’t break, it gets dirty after some uses and the players have to clean it up. Players also have to clean up their passengers' vomit, otherwise everyone that passes through it will get seriously sick.
To keep the passengers happy, it’s important to always get the bathroom cleaned, feed them when they’re hungry, cure them in the medical capsule if they’re sick and keep them entertained – whether by placing them in front of the TV or dancing to them. Bored passengers will walk around the spaceship pushing every button, in every system they can see, and might become an obstacle to the players.
This screenshot shows another spaceship of the game, the Disco Ship; In this situation there’s a lot of chaos happening: the spaceship has no gravity and the inspector is about to shut the company down. This ship also has three different layout variations, and this is one of them, which I also designed
Since this project was also our final term project before graduation (called “Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso” or “TCC” in Brazil), besides the game itself, we also had to identify a game design problematic and present a possible solution to it through our game. Our chosen problem was “How to Add Progression to a Party Game Without Compromising its Emergence and Replayability”. Using Jesper Juul’s definition of emergence and progression in games, we then added key aspects of “roguelike” games to build in Spaceline Fever a certain balance between progression, emergence and what we called “the party element”, which are the combination of characteristics that make a party game.
In this project, I’m responsible for the game design, level design, balancing, 3D modeling and social media.
How the layout variations for the spaceships were designed
Spaceports that were modeled and UV unwrapped by me
Modeled spaceports with options for the team to pick, regarding shapes and colors
It is important to point that I have chosen to walk a separate path from the development team since March 2018, and thereof, I'm not a part of development anymore. Since then the game changed a few times, and is nowadays known as Spacelines From The Far Out.