The Unknown Route | A Game for Two

Made for Create a Multiplayer Game, an OpenAI mission on Handshake: design, build, and ship a live multiplayer game that anyone can join from a single link. ChatGPT was the development partner.

The Unknown Route began with a question: what can two people learn about each other by solving unfamiliar problems together?

Two curious explorers board a spacecraft, survive an unexpected launch, and wake far from Earth. Neither of them starts with a profession. What they can do emerges through exploration, practice, and cooperation.

I built the experience around one shared ship and two independent perspectives. A player can investigate the archive while their partner searches storage, but the resources they spend and the systems they repair belong to both of them. The relationship develops through actions rather than dialogue: sharing a discovery, preparing before departure, taking a risk, helping the other explorer.

From written tasks to a place you can walk through

An early version of the game was based on selecting written tasks from a list. It worked, and it was inert. The design moved into connected top-down rooms with objects, inventory, and physical interactions.

That change made the cooperation legible. A tool found in storage has to be carried to the engine. Navigation data has to be discovered before a destination becomes available at all. Short objectives and contextual hints give direction while leaving room to wander.

Head, suit, accessory, and expression are separate layers. Three hairstyles, three suit styles, three skin tones, and four accent colours combine into an identity the player assembles themselves. Nothing in the set implies a job, a rank, or a gender.

Making modular parts read as one figure was the detailed work: collar overlap, backpack placement, how glasses sit against the visor, the timing of a blink. Front, side, and back views let a player inspect their explorer before boarding.

The opening screen presents the chosen spacecraft as a large luminous blueprint above Mars, annotated like a vessel archive. That technical language carries through the character assembly and the ship's glass interface: fine illuminated lines, dark corners, translucent panels. The explorers deliberately break it. Small, rounded, expressive figures set against hard aerospace drawing is the contrast the whole visual system rests on.

The prototype runs create-and-join across separate devices, with individual character customization, a shared selected ship, persistent inventories, system interactions, navigation discovery, and travel to Echo, the first explorable world beyond the ship. Character presentation and the main interface adapt to desktop and mobile, and an original ambient score runs underneath it.

Expanding the planetary environments, deepening the cooperative events, and finding more ways that discoveries and shared decisions change the route. These are directions, not finished features.

Built with React, TypeScript, CSS, and SVG compositing over a shared persistent game state, and prototyped in close collaboration with ChatGPT. The character and environment artwork was generated with AI and assembled into a reusable modular system. Typography: Oxanium. Original score composed for the project.

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