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The Signal

A sci-fi board game inspired by FTL and Darkest Dungeon: play a scavenger, mercenary or scholar exploring a decaying alien ship room by room. On our three-person team I designed the systems and narrative, and ran the visual production.

The finished game.
My role
Systems and narrative designer: insight cards, progression, risk-reward, playtest iteration, visual production
Team
Georgi Tsvetanski, Alex Jeffries and Zefran Jehle
Format
Physical sci-fi board game, built over one semester
Result
A complete playable build, tested and revised with the team

Design pillars

  • Procedural discovery

    Room tiles and encounters are placed as you explore, so no two runs through the ship feel the same.

  • Risk and reward

    Loot, discoveries and hard choices give players reasons to push deeper. Alien Augments customise each build.

  • Insight system

    Players collect data logs that shape both scoring and the final confrontation with The Corpus.
Team walkthrough of the game.

Story and visuals

I wrote over a dozen Insight cards: fragmented logs, cryptic data and research notes that slowly reveal the ship's purpose and the nature of the Signal, aiming for isolation and unease.

I also ran the visual pipeline in Photoshop: room tiles, enemy tokens, player boards, card and token layouts and custom icons, with licensed Adobe Stock art for the decaying sci-fi look.

The board and room layout.
Building the board in Photoshop.

Balancing

Balancing evolving enemy behaviour against player builds was the core challenge of the build phase.

  • Balancing procedural generation with fairness.
  • Keeping player agency without overwhelming complexity.
  • Tuning difficulty after early playtests.
  • Iterating icons, cards and board layout until they read clearly.
Monster designs.
Equipment and enemy sheet.
Image credits (Adobe Stock)

Licensed from Adobe Stock; search each ID on stock.adobe.com.

1337241987, 1242619877, 539383063, 1420474354, 796495238, 531304463, 971053543, 644836659, 507100069, 623844078, 709447241, 1388930014, 1219422605, 554417793, 916383953, 1242256513, 1109927530, 734301646, 694200398, 701509136, 589381035, 1128312251, 585248097, 1264785348, 760621412, 471882847, 1092308462, 660353982, 597507260, 702464453, 1254781232, 1358880054, 706733728, 1063203575, 507117639, 465328661, 316028652, 921974697.