Emily O’Neal

I’m a creative director and game designer with a proven track record of shipping award-winning games, crafting immersive experiences, and driving innovation across gaming, XR, and interactive media.

Atomaton

2024 | Lighthaus

ROLE: Creative Director
TOOLS: Unity, Figma

Atomaton is a VR/MR city builder game, challenging players to construct their resources at the atomic level. As the project lead, I spearheaded the prototyping and early design process.

Overview

City builder games represent a pinnacle of complexity in gaming, offering boundless opportunities of simulation depth. However, existing experiences on immersive platforms often lean towards cozy gameplay, focusing on simple interactions like placing buildings and zoning cities.

With Atomaton, my aim was to break new ground. We embarked on an early prototyping and “fun-finding” journey, driven by the following objectives:

Introduce a survival aspect to city building in virtual reality
Explore hands-on, immersive solutions for resource collection
Integrate high school chemistry into gameplay mechanics

Concept art for oxygen and hydrogen bond (by Ashley Pinnick)

Exploration & Concepting

Early on, I realized the resouces in survival games mirror the basic buildings blocks of life found in the perioidic table, a fundamental concept in chemistry. Additionally, resources play a pivotal role in any city builder game. To capture these interconnected concepts, I dedicated time to collecting references, sketching, and creating flow charts.

Core game loop revolved around building new resources (atoms and molecules)

Ideas for broader resource structure and simulation impact

Finding an Immersive-First Resource Mechanic

Inspiration struck when I encountered the cloning mechnic in The Last Clockwinder. This ingenious immersive interaction, stringing together a series of small actions to create a larger machine, resonated deeply with me. Cloning also aligned beautifully with chemistry. Similar to chemical reactions, which entail a series of small steps carried out repeatedly, cloning became the foundation for building elements and molecules.

With cloning as our foundation, I explored various chemistry concepts for our resource-building mechanic. Examples included double and single bonds, as well as leveraging the positive and negative charge of subatomic particles.

Brainstorming notes with help from diagrams from The Last Clockwinder designer John Austin’s 2023 GDC talk

Prototyping

With the core game loop and mechanics in place, I handed off my documentation and designs to the engineering and art team. We adopted a playful approach to prototyping, treating it like building toys - fun and unconstrained. Starting with assembling atoms via clone assembly lines, we gradualing expanded our prototyping efforts to include elements of the city building mechanics as well.

Nuclear Fusion Interaction + Sound Prototype

Placing Building on Lunar Base Prototype

Cloning Assembly Line Prototype

Completing the Loop

After weeks of iteration and internal playtesting, we finalized two standalone loops: creating clone assembly lines for building atoms and molecules, and placing buildings on an augmented reality table. I began drafting the initial UI to connect city building with the resources being developed.

Prototype for Nuclear Reactor Module Interaction (players enter modules to build resources)

UI Mockup for MR Build Menu

UI Mockup for MR Tech Tree

Outcomes

Our exploration and prototyping culminated in a vertical slice of the game loop. Combining whitebox assets with refined key art, we created a lunar base inhabited by dynamic citizens, engaging in tasks such as work and research. To ensure their base’s success, players must meticulously construct essential resources like water and oxygen from scratch. We put together a video highlighting our progress.

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oneal.emily1@gmail.com