The Game: - In Axis Lost, you play as a scientist trapped in a desolate research station deep in space with a gravity and space-altering alien artifact. Every time you try to leave, the artifact twists space, putting you back into the lab. You need to find a way to escape the facility or you will be trapped in the lab until you die.  - This first-person, recursive escape room is a student project. It was made in two weeks during the Fall of 2022 in Unity. Through much paper prototyping and iteration, we settled on the concept and mechanics as a team. My Role: - Created the narrative basis for the game before taking input from others. ​- Created a copy of the entire game in Twine outlining the gravity puzzle details. ​- Helped test Mac deployment. ​- Had level design/aesthetic input. Lore: - The research station in Axis Lost is built into an asteroid. Its purpose is to observe a gravity and space-altering alien artifact. The six crewmates aboard it are missing and you need their datapads to access the escape pod, as the tablets are functionally black boxes and dog tags in one. Either everybody is present, or there's proof of their demise. While utilizing the artifact to help you gather the datapads, the button used to activate it becomes broken and you must now hotwire/reactivate it as the station becomes more gloomy and wretched due to the alien's presence.​ ​ Notes & Fun Facts: - It is up for debate whether you are sided with the science team or the alien. - One puzzle is RNG-dependent and can take either 10 seconds or 10 minutes to solve depending on where a specific rock falls when gravity is inverted, making the game unreliable for speedrunning. ​ Scope Creep: - The lore scraps within the game detailing incidents were originally going to take the shape of sticky notes. - I wanted to implement a skybox with an asteroid field to give the player the option to look out into the vastness of space and contemplate whether escape and salvation are really even possible when there are no hints of civilization outside the station. - I wanted the gravity button to invert on a rail and descend with the player, giving them some agency so we could then take it away by having the button be clawed to pieces by the alien after a certain number of datapads were collected. - We wanted to pose crew corpses in the hallways and elsewhere, but we would've had to increase the size of the space station to match one of our original visions.