Star Trek: Timelines

Star Trek: Timelines is a character-collector RPG (CCRPG) featuring characters and ships from all over the franchise. Engage with new narratives with familiar faces as you level up their crew. Fight PvE and PvP alongside your social Fleet and participate in live events to reach the top!

Studio: Wicked Realm Games
Role: Game Designer
Software: Unity
Time on Project: April 2022-August 2022
Team Size: ~35, Design Team of 6
Target Platform: iOS, Android, Steam, Facebook

Game Details

Star Trek: Timelines is a long-running CCRPG where players collect characters and ships, each with their own stats and traits. The main draw is the narrative chapters, which offer players a chance to make choices in conflicts and escapades featuring classic characters from every series. Players bring their best crew through different paths on Away Missions, as well as fight giant enemy ships in Ship Battles. Crew can be upgraded by crafting equipment for them, allowing them to take on harder missions.

The game has a variety of modes to keep players engaged, ranging from the procedural stories of Voyages to the head-to-head combat of the Gauntlet. Content is added weekly, including new characters and challenges. There is also a social Fleet feature, allowing players to come together to compete in events, as well as fight massive bosses in the new Fleet Boss Battle mode.

Contributions and Philosophy

  • Created new crew from design brief to data input for live release
  • Aided in the design of a new gameplay feature
  • Deepened my knowledge of live design and telemetry

My work for Star Trek: Timelines was mostly in content design. New characters would be decided on based on a number of factors, and I would have to research the character to understand how they may fit into our game. With a focus on making the character desirable to players, I would decide on a focus for the character’s design and balance their stats and traits around that. The best part was grabbing screenshots and references for our character art, as well as writing flavor text that made the character’s personality shine. Then, I would use the team’s tools and processes to implement and test the character. I also quickly prototyped a feature in-engine to try and prove the idea, which helped us determine a different direction to go.

While on the project, I was able to learn a lot about what working on a 6 year old game is like. There are a lot of valuable lessons to learn when trying to appeal to both new and veteran players, especially ones so passionate about the franchise. I was able to make content that fans appreciated, and I also got to learn more about designing with live data in mind.