Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions

After my tenure on Astroneer as Creative Director, I moved over to work as the Lead Designer for a new game building off the Astroneer IP and setting. Starseeker had already been in pre-production for a time before I began working on the project – my role was to help unify a number of ideas and concepts into a more coherent gameplay loop experience, working closely with that project’s own Creative Director and Narrative Director.

Rapid Prototyping & Design Direction

The priority was to rally the team around a coherent gameplay loop concept. Starseeker was angling for a cooperative take on the extraction game formula, something we’d taken to calling “expedition” gameplay instead. The project sat on the tipping point between discovery and pre-production, with a lot of ideas and promising elements that needed to be woven into a greater whole.

To this end, I gathered the design team for a focused “paper” prototyping development period with the end goal of presenting an experience we could play for the team that demonstrated how everything we’d be experimenting with could fit together.

Practically, this took the form of a Miro-based board game with overarching systems and sample content. This presented an outline for an expedition: scout the planet, choose a landing location, then work within a limited timeframe to find valuable resources while reacting to environmental hazards, wildlife, and other challenges.

ABOVE: Our game board and respective pieces. Demonstrated here are timer systems to drive player choice and session length, along with encounter and traversal cards to simulate gameplay activities and effort costs. A basic economy and equipment set is present to show the interplay of value that is critical to extraction games.

This became a rallying point for the team to move forward from. It served as a reference to further discussions and refine problem statements, and I used this product to develop an action plan for work in follow-on milestones. It also provided early inspiration for the map interface players use during their expeditions.

Systems & Gameplay Design + Documentation

I spent a lot of time swapping back and forth between doing guidance with the Starseeker design team and boots-on-the-ground design work myself. Here are a sampling of the areas I was involved in reviewing in my lead capacity or developed directly:

• Information Gameplay – This area included explorations into scanning of objects to collect data for quests, limited storage for that data, and various methods of identifying and interacting with game objects in the world. This also overlapped with a lot of UI/X explorations into game feel of discovery and how identified objects were displayed and tracked.
• Core Actions & Gameplay Activities – I helped shepherd a team concepting out the basic actions that ever player would have and how these could be used against interesting challenges. A specific focus of mine was on integrating information gameplay and exploring “science-as-combat” in relation to hostile fauna during expeditions.

BELOW: A selection of diagrams showing various forms of players interactions focused around scanning. These were used in supporting feature documentation geared toward implementing and evaluating in-game activities. Included is a focused ideation exercise to provide a list of possible scanning mechanics to explore.

• Player Communication – Bedrock work regarding pings and the ability for players in a group to keep track of and communicate with each other, including over fairly large distances.
• Session Constraints & Complications – I spent a fair amount of time outlining, prototyping, and testing systems that would provide structure and novelty to expeditions that may otherwise have a relatively fixed map. These included global forcing functions like oxygen limits or map-wide storms, as well as more localized environmental hazards or roving threats.
• Character Classes & Exclusive Abilities – I developed concepts for different kits and special tools or abilities that would provide unique interactions with the game world for players. In particular, how these would be used by players in cooperative ways and what content and systems could be made to require them.

ABOVE: An early character class diagram I put together derived from the Astroneer backpack model of slots and power storage. Starseeker ultimately moved heavily toward gear defining player abilities instead of inherent specialties derived from class types.