Golden Spike

2017

For a college project, I developed the visual assets for a Wild West-themed mobile game, targeted at casual gamers.

I created the game “Golden Spike,” a resource management game where you play as Theodore Judah, the man behind the construction of the first transcontinental railway.

I loved developing this project. For my influences I drew upon many games of my childhood, such as Rise of Nations, Civilisation and Age of Empires.

Character Design

Inspired by games such as the Civilization series, I wanted to have a key historical figure in order to put a face to the player’s motivation. I also wanted to make sure it was based on a real person, since one of my favourite aspects of historical strategy games was using them as a tool to learn about real events in an engaging way. During my research, I learned of Theodore Judah, who was the driving force behind the American Transcontinental Railway. I decided to incorporate him into the game, providing insight and guidance to the player - acting as an indicator of how well the player was doing.

INTERFACES

These were the final interfaces I developed for the project. You could observe your progress in the main interface, which allowed you to interact with the landscape and manage the structures you had built along the railway to generate income. With your income, you were then able to purchase more infrastructure in the shop interface.

During the development, I wanted to make sure that all the interactive features were large and easily identifiable, so that casual gamers could quickly navigate around the game, considering the fast-paced nature of the game-play.