A game shaped by 132 players
Fallen Space · Master’s thesis, Aarhus University · 2022–2023
My master’s thesis combined technology, business and environmental awareness. I built a space game on my own, before AI assistants existed, about humanity leaving an Earth made uninhabitable by climate change. It is meant to make players think about the planet we still have. I then sold it, which made the business side of the thesis real.
In numbers
- Time: 9 months of evenings and weekends. After the changes, the average play session went from 11 to 24 minutes.
- Money: sold for about €2,000.
- Errors: play-testers reported 87 bugs, and 81 were fixed before release.
- Adoption: 61% of players finished the game after the changes, up from 34%.
- Scale: 132 players, 5 in-depth interviews, 6 levels, about 40 minutes of play and 9,000 lines of GDScript.
Building it alone
Everything was mine: the design, the code in Godot, the levels, the sound and the story. 9 months, most evenings and weekends, with the engine’s documentation open on a second screen.
Leaving Earth through the debris of everything we put in orbit.
Testing with players
132 players tested the game, and I interviewed 5 of them in depth about how it felt to play.
What changed because of them
- A darker, more immersive atmosphere, so the world felt real.
- A reworked storyline that kept players more engaged.
- An ending built around one player’s idea.
After the changes, the average play session went from 11 to 24 minutes, and most players finished the game instead of leaving after the first level.