SEND Spaceflight Asteroid Escape 

The Project

We were tasked to create a game for SEND students as part of a collaboration between the college and a local SEND Primary School. The assignment tasked us to create a educational game, based on the genres and games the kids like to play. The game had to feature some mandatory features, such as for it to be educational, vibrant, fun and accessible. Before we began production on our chosen games, we had to come up with concept ideas with rough illustrations to pitch to the kids on a 2nd meeting, once we gained feedback and votes on the best idea we could being production.

Along side the main games production project, we were tasked to design and execute a marketing campaign to feature on various social platforms such as Twitter/X and YouTube to grow my audience of the game I was making and try to gain a following of the project. Along with that, we were tasked with developing a website that would serve as the main page for the game and display updates for the game, this was never published officially. 

The game I made as you know is called Spaceflight: Asteroid Escape, which is a make it as far as possible game which requires the player to make it as far as possible without dying. The purpose of my game is to focus the players attention in avoiding damage and staying alive for as long as possible, the dangers the players face are waves of asteroids that may potentially destroy the players ship. The game is for people that may have ADHD or OCD which may cause them to feel fidgety and struggle to keep attention. Its to try and let people with these conditions focus their mind on one thing and take away from a restless mind. Ultimately my game doesn't have any direct educational value but it achieved the rest of the requirements such as for it to be fun, vibrant, and most importantly accessible, I know this as the feedback from the children on the last meeting was very successful and came back with mostly positive responses.

Design

When designing Spaceflight: Asteroid Escape, I wanted to go for a pixel art theme. Nothing directly inspired me to take this direction of theme, it was just the design choice I thought was the most well suited for the game I was making, and I think from a first game perspective, the design is the easiest to work with. 

The Player Ships

These ships are the 3 different ship choices you have to choose from in Spaceflight. Originally, my idea was to give them all different pros and cons to vary the gameplay, based on your selection such as, the blue ship would have been the most well rounded ship, the green would have been the fastest more agile but weakest with the red ship being a gunner ship and relatively strong. This idea was scrapped eventually, as work on getting the games core purpose working took first priority and took far longer then expected.

The Dangers of Space

All 3 of the dangers of space were going to play a role in the game to really add a degree of challenge and make the game more then just dodging asteroids. The enemy grunts and bosses both were set up and working but I could not figure out how to code them in to work with the main game scene. I wanted to bring the enemies in after a certain game time to challenge the player in something other then only dodging asteroids, but I could not remove the asteroid waves spawning and having only the enemies.

The Power Ups of Space!

The power ups of space were all scrapped, I could not figure out a way to make these work in the game, they were all going to enhance the gameplay for a certain time and boost the player further when collected, such as shield overload would make the player immune to damage for a certain time, or laser core to stop weapon cooldown so you could shoot without delay.

Referring to Concepts

The images above were what I pitched to the children to get their take on whether the game is something that they would be interested in and met with their criteria, it was also what I had to base the creation of the game on, so it served multiple purposes. Although the game wasn't made to the exact concept I had in mind, I believe that all the core mechanic and fundamentals were met to and the final game is very much comparable to the concept sketches.