Star-Wired
After returning from a star-dust-scavenging trip, Bit, our little starling captain, finds his Ship commandeered by an intergalactic militia, the Infestors. To save his home, he ventures within the circuit boards of his Starship friend. He must rewire the damage done by the Infestors and rid the circuits of malware.
Star-Wired is a whimsical, endearing, top-down puzzle game.
The central mechanic you will encounter is a hilariously wiggly cable that must be pushed, tangled, pully-ed, wrapped around, and swung to complete puzzles.
Gameplay
The central mechanic of Star-Wired is a physics cable that acts as the cord to a plug. This cord must be maneuvered around obstacles, puzzles, and pulleys to open doors, unlock batteries, or unplug dangerous enemies. This game was designed with original Zelda dungeons in mind. Each room acts as a puzzle box that has only one correct solution. The difficulty increases with each level and new ways of manipulating the cable are introduced as the new level requires.
Star-Wired is available to download for free on Steam and Itch.io.
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Concept and Final Art
I was honored to be the Lead Artist and 2D Artist for Star-Wired. After we had the main mechanic and narrative down, we began production by creating concept variations for themes and styles. Then I presented the team with the ones I thought fit best and we voted for the retro 90s/Y2K technology look. I also created what we called "Greeble Sheets" to design 3D models and pass them on to the 3D artists.
A few of my concepts fell out of scope so we scrapped them from the game. For example, the "hub world" was going to be a place to buy different skins and powerups. This mode would have also given the player information about how many rooms they had "cured" of the malware so far.
Design
We wanted to give Star-Wired a nostalgic Y2K tech feel and accomplished this through our color palettes, Tetris-shaped rooms, and puzzle narratives like plugging in an iPod, or a laser tag themed room. Some of these images are cinematic screenshots with a special camera and some of them are top-down gameplay screenshots. We spent a ton of time programming and tweaking a top-down camera that flows and settles smoothly, frames the composition, but still gives the player all of the necessary information.
