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The Stowaway
Game Design/
Narrative
The Stowaway is a First-person Point & Click Adventure Game set on a spaceship headed to Mars. You Play as a stowaway on this spaceship when the engine malfunctions but with a fully automated crew & all legitimate passengers in hyper-sleep you're the only one capable of saving the ship from impending doom. The player must solve puzzles to access additional parts of the ship while finding tablets with logs to figure out what went wrong.
Trailer
Story
Summary
In the future commercial interplanetary travel has become an everyday occurrence. Ships are now fully automated and feature hyper-sleep pods for the passengers. You are stowed away hiding on one of these ships on its way to Mars when suddenly something goes wrong. You are the only person capable of fixing the malfunctioning engine and saving everyone onboard from the vast emptiness of space. Feel the cold and lonely atmosphere as you explore the ship looking for a way to save it.
Backstory
I wrote the story for this game and with not having any character artists for the game had to look for ways to tell it without any. This gave me an idea to focus on automation as a core theme of the story. The backstory is told through journal entries on tablets written by the former crew spread throughout the spaceship. The journal entries gives the player an insight into the day-to-day life of the former crew while also revealing the process of automation resulting in the lack of a crew. The Journals also hint at what went wrong with the engine.
Puzzles
I worked on the puzzles with two other designers. The puzzles are the obstacles of the game being disguised as parts of the ship that needs to be fixed by the player.
The first puzzle is one of two parts. There's a door that's locked so the player needs to use an electric box to open it. However, the box is screwed shut so before the door can be opened the player needs to find a tool to remove the screws. How the player does this is by looking at the computers in the room showing logs of different passengers in hypersleep and by looking at their professions seeing that one of them is a carpenter. Then going to that passenger's locker and using the code written in the carpenters profile to open her locker where the player will find a screwdriver. Now the player can open the electricity box.
When the box is opened the player is greeted with a puzzle that takes inspiration from Tower of Hanoi with the twist being that every piece is stackable on any piece, the pieces are color-coded the goal being to put all pieces in the corresponding colored area and only three pieces can be stacked on the same time. When this puzzle is solved, the door is opened.
For the second puzzle the player's goal is to unlock a door to get into the engine room. To achieve this, the player must look in the room for a keycard to the control panel. Then the player must press the buttons of the control panel in a specific order to unlock the door. This order is written on a note hidden in the room but its not essential to see it to solve the puzzle.
The engine room has two puzzles. The engine that needs to be fixed is visible as soon as the player enters the room, but it's missing two cogs that are necessary to interact with it. One cog is placed on a table that the player easily can see from the engine location. This introduces the player to the concept of the other cogs. The final cog the player needs is behind a walled-off area with a locked door. The player can however, see the cog in this area through a window right next to the puzzle they need to complete to open the door and gain access to the cog.
The puzzle is a sliding puzzle where you need to align cables correctly to open the door.
When all the cogs are collected the player can finally do the engine fixing puzzle. The goal of the puzzle is to align three pipes along the center of the engine. This is done by rotating the cogs that in turn rotate parts of the engine. The interaction is not one to one with two of the cogs moving multiple parts of the engine.
When this puzzle is complete the ship is saved and the game is over.
