My Little Rocket
Embrace your inner child and build the toy rocket of your imaginations!
Embrace your inner child and build the toy rocket of your imaginations!
In My Little Rocket, the sky’s the limit. Build, launch, and pilot your toy rocket through 4 unique courses from your imagination! How you choose to construct your rocket will affect how it flies, so build wisely, but don’t be afraid to get creative!
In one semester, we created an aesthetically delightful game with high replayability value that encouraged players to overcome challenges with creative engineering. The game was received with overwhelming positivity from playtesters, professors, classmates, and friends. Here’s what people said about the game:
“This reminds me of when I used to run around my house flying my Lego spaceship as a kid.”
“I keep crashing and it’s so frustrating but I can’t stop playing!”
“My favorite part of the game was building crazy lopsided spaceships and trying to pilot them through obstacles.”
This game was the final project for the Intermediate Game Design & Development class I took in college. I worked with a partner over the course of 5 months to design and develop a game from scratch using Unity. In addition to the overall game design and engineering, I mainly focused on project management, level design, and UI design.
Below is our original vision for the game:
“We want to provide our players with a delightful aesthetic experience where they can express their creativity. We also want to present challenges that are mildly frustrating in order to motivate players to keep playing. Through the affordances of the game, we want to give our players the ability to explore alternative choices that are unique and impactful.”
Right from the first brainstorm session, my partner and I knew we wanted our game to have a playful art style featuring bright pastel colors. Once we decided upon the game concept, it didn’t take too long to figure out the theme. The game is played from the perspective of a child, building the rocket and flying it through different rooms in the house, which is why the obstacles take the form of various household objects. The vibrant aesthetic of the game is meant to invoke the sense of childlike wonder through the lens of imagination.
One major challenge was figuring out how to make the rocket building phase simple to learn but hard to master. We wanted to give players some degree of control over how their rocket turned out while at the same time encourage the construction of imperfect rockets. As a result, we implemented an axis lock-and-drop system inspired by arcade claw machines. By handicapping building precision and intentionally not having an undo button, we forced players to embrace their mistakes and keep moving forward, regardless of how disastrous their rockets looked.
We also wanted players to feel like no two launches were ever the same. Rather, they would be dictated by the player’s construction and piloting choices. To do this, we had to make sure players would find the levels challenging but not overly frustrating. We built an in-game system that kept track of the level they were on, how many times players crashed into obstacles, and which obstacles they crashed into. With the help of the system’s data, we tweaked the levels so that instead of the statistics showing players repeatedly crashing into the same obstacle, the crashes were evenly distributed throughout the levels, indicating that players were exploring different strategies and routes to complete each level.