Game Design Inspirations: Heat Signature’s Galactic Zoom and Teleporting Items

Hello and welcome to Game Design Inspirations! GDI is a weekly bite-sized nugget of brilliant game design, taken from the games that I play “for research purposes”.

The rogue-like genre, a pioneered by the 1980 dungeon-crawling game Rogue, is characterized by procedurally generated dungeons, making each level in the game random and unique.

Screenshot of Rogue on an IBM PC

One of the levels in Heat Signature. The graphics are way nicer, but the concept of corridors and rooms are the same

Groundbreaking games of recent years have taken the rogue-like genre and evolved them into something new. Games like Siralim, Spelunky, Risk of Rain and Dead Cells each took the procedurally generated levels formula and added their own spin — adding a monster-raising strategy mechanic, making the game real-time instead of turn-based, changing the theme from Fantasy to Sci-Fi, to even changing the whole presentation of the game from an overhead map view to a side scrolling platformer.

Heat Signature is another great game to add to that list, with its amazing Galactic Zoom mechanic.

In the game, players pilot a pod across the galaxy, going on missions to breach and infiltrate enemy spaceships. What’s impressive is how the game seamlessly transitions from the player flying the ship at the galaxy level —

To then immediately transition into the roguelike dungeon level once the player breaches the enemy ship.

This flow of flying and then going into stealth missions would be jarring if it wasn’t designed flawlessly, but Heat Signature pulls it off with aplomb (side note: The Supporter’s Edition of the game has great development videos from Tom on how the game evolved over several prototypes, along with great insights on his design thought process).

Another interesting mechanic that the game has is how the player can teleport any item on the level to himself. This mechanic was added mostly to allow the player to use as many tools as he can and not worry about managing them in his inventory. No other game has done this; it works for Heat Signature and is a big part of what makes the game fun, but it does go against the heavily ingrained pattern of having to be in the vicinity to pick up an item.

Another significant part of what makes the game work is how well-thought out the overall user experience interface is. It takes the least amount of clicks possible to achieve something in the menus. Going in and out of pause mode takes as less friction as possible, and feels like an actual part of the game instead of being a different mode.

Finally, the game’s personal mission for each character does a good job of setting up the narrative for a rogue-like game, with people sharing stories of their characters’ successes and horrible deaths. The random nature of roguelikes usually don’t lend well to telling stories. It’s impressive that Heat Signature was able to create a game with a galactic scale that also has the intimacy of a player’s imagination.

Today’s Moment of Zen:

Source!

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