Hamsterstellar

Project Overview

Hamsterstellar is a space adventure game built in Unity, telling a heartbreaking and thriving quest through space and time to get back home. Or is it? Players take control of an unlikely hero on an epic voyage across procedurally generated star systems, encountering strange worlds, quirky characters, and unexpected narrative twists along the way. The game blends space exploration with rich storytelling, allowing players to chart their own course through a universe full of mysteries and surprises. Designed for PC, it embraces the spirit of classic space adventure games while adding modern mechanics and a deeply personal story that resonates long after the credits roll.

My Role & Contributions

As the sole developer on Hamsterstellar, I was responsible for every aspect of the game's creation — from game design and programming to art direction and narrative writing. I built the procedural generation systems that create unique star systems for each playthrough, ensuring variety and replayability. I designed and implemented the branching narrative engine that tracks player choices across the entire game, allowing decisions made early in the journey to have meaningful consequences hours later. I created the space navigation system with its star map interface, allowing players to plot courses between systems while managing fuel and resources. I developed the character dialogue system complete with branching conversation trees, emotional state tracking for NPCs, and dynamic relationship mechanics that affect how crew members interact with each other. The atmospheric visual style was achieved through custom shaders for nebulae, star fields, and planetary surfaces, combined with a carefully curated color palette that shifts between warm and cold tones depending on the narrative mood.

Technical Challenges

The procedural generation system was the most technically demanding aspect of the project. Each star system needed to feel handcrafted despite being algorithmically generated — planets needed logical compositions, orbital mechanics had to feel right, and points of interest needed to be distributed in ways that encourage exploration without overwhelming the player. I built a layered generation pipeline where high-level galaxy structure is determined by seed values, then each system populates based on contextual rules that consider the player's current narrative state and progression. The branching narrative system required a robust state management architecture that could track dozens of decision flags, relationship values, and quest states without introducing bugs or contradictions in the story. I implemented a custom scriptable object-based dialogue system in Unity that allows for complex conditional branching, variable insertion, and event triggering within conversations. Performance optimization was important to maintain smooth frame rates during space traversal scenes where multiple procedurally generated celestial bodies, particle effects, and lighting calculations compete for GPU resources.

Results & Impact

Hamsterstellar was released on itch.io and received positive feedback from players who praised the emotional depth of the narrative, the replayability offered by the procedural systems, and the charming contrast between the lighthearted hamster protagonist and the weighty themes of the story. Players particularly appreciated how their choices genuinely affected the outcome, with many reporting multiple playthroughs to explore different narrative branches. The game was showcased at several indie game events and received recognition for its narrative design and procedural generation approach. The project strengthened my skills in procedural content generation, narrative systems architecture, and the art of crafting meaningful player agency — where every decision feels consequential without making the player feel lost or overwhelmed. It remains one of my most creatively ambitious projects to date.