Beresheet the spacecraft

Beresheet the spacecraft was the first Israeli spaceship that was launched to space with a goal to land on the moon. As part of the marketing and PR endeavours of this venture, the team behind Beresheet, SpaceIL, wanted to create a game to accompany the spaceship journey to the moon.

I joined forces again with the great team at Kayma, and lead the design of this project.

Role
UI/UX, Art direction, Prototyping, Motion design, Illustrations, Gamification, sound design
Partners
Kayma (Design)
Sheep 11 (Development)
Julia Sagalin CContent)
Client
Space IL
Date
2019

Project Brief

Our timeframe was very tight. This project was approved at the end of December 2018, and the ship was meant to launch in February 2019. We had only 2 months to think, design and develop an entire game.

The client had 3 major demands. It should be a trivia game about the space. It should be both in English and Hebrew. Lastly, the advancement in the game should somehow correlate with the route of the ship in space. Other than that, we can do whatever we want.

From the first concept meeting, we knew that we will focus our efforts around the question answering experience. The time frame did not allowed us to create complex graphics and animations, so we decided to focus on micro interactions, sounds and the keyboard experience.

The questions screens

A big focus was put on making the keyboard and typing a bit more fun. We created a custom keyboard with unique typing animations and sounds to go give a bit more playful feeling to the answering experience. We also added some success animations whenever the user would answer correctly

The route screen

One of the client's demands was to brake the route into several stations, that would correlate to the spaceship advancement in space. This was proven challenging both in game design and in the UI design. We decided to brake the game into 22 stations. each station will be locked at first, and would only open once the real spaceship reach a certain point in space.

This lead us to think about how to visualise a non existing station in mid space. After many iterations and concepts, we decided to symbolise each station as some amorphic mineral. We also decided that the advancement in space would be in 3D, along the Z axis. We felt this would give make a bit more “in space” feel.

Sign up flow

We used a very standard sign up flow. users can either sign up anonymously with name and a custom avatar or sign up with Facebook, using their real name and picture.

Project conclusion

While this was one of the fastest and nicest projects I had the pleasure to work on, this did not come without flaws. The timeframe was too harsh, and we had to make a lot of compromises on gameplay the design and development.

Beresheet the spaceship ended up crashing on the moon. which didn't help the game take off :). The gaming industry is overflowing with new games coming out everyday, and without a serious money marketing campaign it is almost impossible to get any attention.

Never the less this was a great experience and I think the overall outcome was pleasing and had a real atmosphere and uniqueness.
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