I wanted to practice some Blender skills for a game I am working on, and I rediscovered art deco and came up with this idea for a small cube rhombic dodecahedron satellite.
Probably not going to be included in the game, but I am really loving the Art Deco geometric patterns and decorations. I want to explore how to blend them with more contemporary spaceship designs without going full Bioshock / Prey.
I have a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction as well as being a game developer myself. I can critically evaluate your UI and find what we would professionally call "usability issues" that in the gaming community are better known as "quality of life" (improvements). Usability issues can significantly impact any game and addressing them can be the difference between an enjoyable experience or an endless source of frustration.
For example, in the video above from my own game r/SineFine you can see a naive implementation of selection of small targets, purely based on ray-casting intersection. When the targets are very small, distant targets are very difficult to select. From "literature" we know that one way to improve this would be automatically select the closest targets, even though we are not really "hovering" it. But you can see the difference it makes in terms of QoL. Knowing how to solve these problems is part of the expertise I have.
You can find more information on my website, as well as some videos that I made in the past on this kind of critical analysis applied to games. For example: Terra Invicta | Hearts of Iron IV | Starfield, if you want an idea of the kind of work that I can offer.
What I can do:
What I cannot do:
If interested, you can contact me here or via mail at or via our website. Plus, all consultancy income goes directly to funding the development of my own game and to other people here too. Circular economy, there you go!
In Sine Fine (latin for Without End), you play as an artificial consciousness that, after humanity's extinction, is charged with finding a new habitable planet, no matter how long it might take.
This is the UI screen through which you can plan interstellar missions to send out probes to explore the galaxy. You, the player, do not physically travel (you remain located in the Solar System) but send out probes to explore the galaxy. So, you will need to give instructions to the (autonomous) ships that they will perform once they get there.
As you can see, you will need to select a ship, a destination, and decide the deltaV allocation between the part used to travel to the system itself, and the part reserved for in-system operations.
The mission itself is divided in three phases:
The profile has implications on how fast you can get there and which missions you can perform once you arrive. A flyby won't let you be able to build anything of course. You will only have a limited time window during which to perform some surveys of the system.
You will act based on incomplete knowledge. You might not know exactly which planets are in the system (perhaps only the largest ones), so if you reserve an insufficient amount of fuel you might not be able to visit the whole system.
Once it arrives, it will perform the missions given if it can and then relay back the information. The signal or communications in general will travel back to you at the speed of light so you won't know exactly what has happened the moment it happens. In game terms this means waiting just a bit more. Imagine it takes two hundred years for a ship to arrive to Alpha Centauri like in the video, then you will start getting "news" at t + 204 + 4.3 years (the distance in light years between Sol and Alpha Centauri).
Once the in-system operations are completed, you can decide what happens to the ship. Do you trust to abandon it? What if somebody or something else were to find it?
What's missing there is some more detail about the actual in-game effect that certain choices mean. Like the chance of actually making it there, or whether you go too far out "into the black" and receiving signals might become more problematic. Second thing is another minor UI screen to be able to specify further details for some of the missions (like building an outpost and choosing where exactly or if you only have incomplete knowledge of the system, you can let the AI decide based on some parameters like best resource planet, or closest planet to the sun, etc.).
A note about the animations of the graphics of the "cards". While the rest of the game has a more realistic style, these low-poly graphics are inteded to be a "meta-simulation", as in, what's going on in the mind of the Artificial Consciousness you play as and meant to be abstract. But in the case we have the resources to actually create the models for all these parts, these could eventually be replaced with more realistic 3D parts down the line, or even the specific ship you chose for the mission.