And Beyond

And Beyond is an exploration platformer where you travel between different small planets in search of your ship parts since you crash landed in this galaxy. You play as an astronaut whose ship is in pieces all around this unknown galaxy and your goal is to find all the pieces and put it back together so you can continue on your journey. You will also find a new form of alien life called Nauts throughout this galaxy. Some of them are kind and will help you out but others may be a little more troublesome than most. You can walk, dash, jump, and fly around this galaxy and explore its many different planets in search of your missing ship parts.

Controls: 

WASD to move

Mouse to control camera

E to interact or pick up objects

Space to jump and fly

Goal: Design a game for our senior capstone that each person on our team would enjoy working on over the next two quarters. Then lead that team over the course of those two quarters and maintain the vision of game.

Team:

Designers - David Yonamine, Yongfeng Ruan

Programmers - Antonio De Francesco, Jason Kappes

Pillars:

Exploration -  We wanted the planets to be large enough so that the player could look around on each one of them but also small enough that they didn't need to spend too much time on one particular planet. We also added larger planets as a center for other orbiting planets so that the player could have a better sense of direction in the world since these planets would always be in one place.

Simplicity - We wanted this game to be family friendly and easy to pick up for people who don't usually play video games. We didn't want to have complex systems with pin point precision movements, we wanted our game to be easily picked up and understood and relaxing to play.

Invested - I wanted to make sure that our team was working on a project that we all would enjoy for the next 20+ weeks so we spent lots of time finding something that each of us were interested in. We went through a number of different ideas then eventually landed on some sort of game that used gravity as a core mechanic in the game. After that we went through a few more ideas and landed on this planet traversal game, something that each of us found interesting.