The Signal
Sci-fi board game built with two teammates — FTL and Darkest Dungeon inspired exploration, procedural room layouts, and a narrative insight system.
Georgi Tsvetanski, Alex Jeffries, Zefran Jehle
Overview
The Signal is a sci-fi narrative board game inspired by FTL and Darkest Dungeon. Players explore a decaying alien vessel while navigating procedural room layouts and hostile encounters.
Key Design Pillars
- Procedural Discovery:Room tiles and encounters are placed dynamically, ensuring no two explorations feel identical.
- Dopamine-Driven Loops:Focused on high-impact loot drops and risk-reward decision points inspired by modern roguelikes.
- Insight System:A narrative-driven mechanic where players gather data logs that influence both scoring and the final confrontation.
Visual Production
I managed the visual asset pipeline, combining custom iconography with licensed stock assets to create an oppressive, decaying sci-fi aesthetic.
- - Photoshop-driven board & tile creation
- - Custom card & token layout design
- - Fragmented narrative flavor text writing
Systems Balancing
Balancing evolving enemy behaviors against player "builds" was the core challenge of the implementation phase.
View Balancing SheetOverview & Key Features
My design philosophy focused on dopamine triggers: discovery, progression, risk-reward choices, and environmental storytelling. Players take the role of a scavenger, mercenary, or scholar exploring procedurally generated rooms aboard an ancient alien ship.
- - Procedural exploration with player-driven choices
- - Evolving enemy behaviors and randomized encounters
- - Loot and Alien Augment system to customize player builds
- - Insight-driven storytelling influencing both narrative and scoring
- - Final confrontation with The Corpus boss
Narrative & Visual Design
The Signal was heavily inspired by the oppressive tone of FTL and Darkest Dungeon. I focused on environmental storytelling and flavor text to create isolation, mystery, and unease.
I designed over a dozen Insight cards containing fragmented logs, cryptic data, and research notes that slowly reveal the vessel’s true purpose and the nature of The Signal.
- - Room tiles, enemy tokens, and player boards
- - Custom iconography and card/token layouts
- - Thematic illustrations and Adobe Stock assets for a decaying sci-fi aesthetic
Challenges
- - Balancing procedural generation with fairness
- - Preserving player agency without overwhelming complexity
- - Tuning difficulty after early playtest feedback
- - Iterating visual communication (icons, cards, board layout) for clarity
Built and playtested a complete physical board game from concept to final build within one semester.
View Equipment and Enemy SheetOur Visual Assets & Sources
The following visual assets are licensed from Adobe Stock. You can find each asset by searching its ID number on stock.adobe.com.
Adobe Stock Asset IDs: 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.