Stationeers

This was my first project at RocketWerkz, where I worked with a small team of roughly 5-10 people at a time. Given that the programmers were focused on the more complex aspects of the game, my time with them to work on the UI was limited. As a result, it was crucial to design the UI to be simple, intuitive, and implementable within a short time frame. This experience taught me how to balance creativity with practicality, ensuring that the UI was both effective and efficient for the team to integrate.

As Stationeers was an Early Access game, we had frequent updates, particularly in our beta branch on Steam. Communicating these updates to players was essential, as the community, being largely engineering-focused, appreciated detailed information about what was being added or changed in the game. Providing in-depth notes helped keep players informed and engaged, allowing them to better understand the new features and improvements. This transparency also fostered a stronger relationship with the community, as they could see the direct impact of their feedback and the ongoing development process.

Stationeers being a complex game, we recognised the need for thorough tutorials to help players understand its various systems. As part of this, we made tutorials a major focus later in development. To make learning more rewarding, I designed badges that players could earn by mastering different systems in the game, similar to the mission badges astronauts would receive from NASA. These badges served as both a motivation for players to explore the intricacies of the game and a fun way to acknowledge their progress as they learned and grew within the game.

The Stationpedia was a fantastic idea from Dean that really enhanced the player's experience in Stationeers. We used rich text in TextMeshPro to create links between different subjects, allowing players to use it like an encyclopedia. One of its key advantages was that each page was created at runtime, meaning it would always stay up to date. For example, if a new machine allowed the creation of an item, the Stationpedia would immediately reflect that change. This was especially helpful in the early stages of the game when community-made wikis would quickly go out of date. Additionally, the Stationpedia offered customisation options, such as resizing, making it semi-transparent, and provided a robust search function to help players find the information they needed efficiently.