Space Explorer post mortem
This was my second LD48. I flip flopped with ideas the first night and settled on something rather generic that I hoped would be fun.
The idea was to make a space shooter set in a random starfield. You start with a shuttle and explore the universe making money, checking out planets, and battling other ships. Stations allow you to upgrade your ship and weapons.
What went wrong..
I never came up with a design doc, which would have helped me budget my time, and realize which features to work on first. At the end of the first 24 hours I realized I needed to limit the amount of objects in game by setting up a spacial hash. It took all morning sunday to do that, and if I had done that from the beginning I could have saved a lot of time.
Lack of content: I designed the game to make it easy to add new ships, weapons, and planet variations. Despite that, I only made 3 ships and 2 guns.
Cutting of features: Some features would have been easy to add and made gameplay more interesting:
- Fuel: Having to buy or find fuel would have made money and exploration more pertinent.
- Shield and ship statistics upgrade: Would have not taken to much time to add. Especially random ship upgrades from visiting planets.
- AI teams: I had planned to have 2 ai factions, and pirates who attacked any weaker vessels.
- Displayed statistics. It would have been nice to see the health of enemies/asteroids when you target them. I also thought about giving enemies random names.
What went right
Not spending too much time on the graphics. I consider myself more of an artist than a coder, limiting my art making time was hard but necessary in the end.
Guerrilla coding. My goal was to pound out features, as quickly and ugly as possible. Making this game was like surfing a massive tsunami of bad code, but since I was working non stop, I could actually remember what I was doing.
Rethinking the player controls: Originally you used the keyboard to rotate your ship. Adding mouse control for the rotation and turret aiming makes for a pleasant user experience, and gives you a needed advantage over the enemies.
Sticking to my guns: I got majorly overwhelmed by the amount of features that needed to be in place to make my idea playable. I refused to give up, and in the end came up with an actual game with more features than I had originally planned.
Music: I only spent a half hour playing music, but I came up with a very appropriate song for the game. It’s short, spacey, and really sets the mood.
What I Learned
Well I think it’s time I branched out from using Blender as my realtime engine. I love having my dev. environment be the same as my 3D modeling/sculpting/animating/texture painting tools, but I was discouraged with how my game is published (the .exe wasn’t displaying the font correctly and I ended up distributing the blend with a windows version of Blender)
I think I’m going to start working with Unity free engine. People here give it good reviews and it seems to import art assets from Blender very quickly.