Last Call: Everything Is Temporary

The theme was Everything Is Temporary: what if a hero saves world after world, and none of it lasts? You play Veer, a cargo pilot who lands for fuel, hears a call for help and can't say no. I wanted players to feel hope first and loss later, and for that they have to keep moving through the story.

Before building anything, I wrote the whole game down in a design doc: the story, five levels, ten characters, the enemies and how each level flows.

Kora, Meru and Soma build Veer up; Kora Ruins and the Fortress, where you face Kaal, take it all away. In each level you explore the colony, fight the Void, save the people, earn a Core Crystal upgrade and fly on. You aim with the mouse and dash to slip past enemy shots.

The first prototype was a graybox of Level 1, the Kora market. It had one job: show me whether the space was readable and fun to move through before any real art went in.

• A level director script runs each level's story beats: the calm arrival, the attack, the quest and the return to the ship.
• The player, the weapons and the five enemy types are definitions in one game config, so I could balance everything in the Inspector without touching code.
• Dialogue with portraits, and SAATHI, Veer's ship computer, who gives hints, objectives and warnings.
• Core Crystals give upgrades that break later in the story, and a scrap shop gives permanent ones.

The art is detailed sci-fi pixel art at 480x270, set fully in space: glass-dome colonies, a white city and a dark fortress.

Friends and classmates played it, and the same problem kept coming up: they didn't know where to go. Puzzles like the Level 1 valves weren't clear.

More dialogue wouldn't fix that, so I put the next step into the world. Valves got floating labels, locked objects now say why they're locked, and SAATHI's hints get stronger the longer you're stuck.

The finished prototype has five levels, a boss and one ending: Veer wins, dies and takes Kaal with him, and Tara, the girl he saved in the first level, becomes the next Ranger.

What I learned

• Players follow what the world shows them. Labels, prompts and hints did what long dialogue couldn't.
• Writing the design level by level made building and fixing much faster.
• Keeping every value in definition assets made balancing quick.
• A full story with a real ending can fit into five short levels.

Next

More playtests, and a more polished boss fight.