Inspiration
Our theme was visibility. We imagined an alien whose signal was so faint it blended into the noise of space, and a person who finally notices it. Stella is the last one left at her radio observatory when she picks up a strange frequency from a part of the sky no one usually checks.
What it does
You play as Stella, exploring the observatory control room and interacting with its equipment. Two stations hold the puzzles: tune the knobs to find the signal, then adjust the sliders until the readings line up into the right coordinates. Solve both and the transmission comes through, revealing Furcifer, a lonely alien who lost his home world and has been broadcasting across the galaxy, hoping someone would finally hear him.
How we built it
We built Stranded Frequency in Unity with C#, collaborating through Unity Version Control. The team created original pixel art characters and environments, chiptune music, a main menu, an observatory room with interactable stations, two tuning puzzles, and an ending sequence with an animated Furcifer, typewriter subtitles, and an audio waveform visualizer.
Challenges we ran into
Coordinating a 10-person team across in-person and remote members in a single weekend, scoping our ideas to what we could finish in time, and bringing art, audio, and code from many contributors together in one project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
For most of us, this was our first game jam. We're proud of the game's cohesive look, its original art and music, and an ending that makes Furcifer feel seen.
What we learned
How to collaborate in a shared Unity project, how important it is to plan when art gets handed off to code, and how to cut scope under a hard deadline.
What's next for Stranded Frequency
- Stella's full walking animations, already drawn by our artist
- A dialogue system to tell more of the story
- Stella's chromesthesia, so players see the signal as color
- A spectrogram puzzle that reveals Furcifer's image hidden in the sound
Built With
- adobe
- adobe-illustrator
- background
- c#
- framework
- levels
- photoshop
- ui
- unity
