Ludum Dare #22 was my third consecutive time participating in Ludum Dare. Reflecting back on my past entries I can see clearly that each time the quality of my entry improves.  This time was no different, you can play my entry Alone In Space… here and be sure to submit and check out the Leaderboards here.

What was left out: (but I wanted in)

> More resource types, I wanted you to be able to gather gas from the nebula’s, that would have been worth more than ore.

> Two more types of asteroids. As it is you have no control over whether you mine metal, or Ore. I wanted different asteroid types to allow you to hunt down just Ore, or just metal.

> More Dialog, as it was I wrote the small bit of introduction dialog within the last hour of working on it, to try and set the scene.

What went Wrong: (I’m still  a pessimist)

> The length of the game, is too long for the type of game. It takes around half an hour to upgrade the ship so that you can easily defeat the waves of enemies. I wanted it to take around 15 minutes to upgrade, and defeat the waves.

> The difficulty is to hard. I didn’t get the enemy ship AI quite how I wanted it, I wanted them to fly side by side, but instead they stack up on top of each other. There are also some cases where they fire more shots than they should be able to. They should be able to fire four shots at a time, but there are times when eight or more are fired.

> I wanted the mini-map to show incoming ships, and the location of the drone (used to trigger the enemy ships) but it was causing an error that made the game unplayable. I changed it to show you the location of the station, as well as the location of asteroids (after you pickup a kitty).

> The graphics, they are almost how I wanted them, but I never had a chance to revise them. I wanted to add some lines to the ships and space station to imply joining pieces, and curves. I’m also not happy with the particle trail for behind the ships, its not that its wrong, its just not what I pictured.

Too Many shots...

What Went Right:

> The music and Sound effects. Although the mp3 don’t loop correctly (I’m not sure how to make them loop, or what format will loop. I still felt the music was a success. I used GreaseMonkey’s script to generate the .it files, then converted to mp3 using VLC. For sound effects I used sfxr, and though the sound effects added to the game.

> The Gameplay was how I intended for it to be, I wanted you to have to venture out from the station to mine, and in doing so you would find the kitten, and the drone. As I mentioned before I wanted the game to play out faster, but that would be achievable with more control over what you collected, so you could earn more money from one load.

> The Leaderboard/ Online High Score table, I had most of the game finished before I decided to add in the highscore table, but I’m glad I did. It add a sense of achievement when you set the highest score, for all to see. I just wish I had the time to add an in game viewer for the leaderboard.

What Comes Next:

I plan to continue with Alone In Space… I want to work on a revised version and over the coarse of a month create a more polished game to release. I’ll be blogging about the progress on the 1 Month Game Website. I will probably start the revision next week. Off the top of my head the revision will include everything mentioned in the What Went Wrong section, as well as more levels, and anything else that I think of while working on it.

Tags: postmortem

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2011 at 2:45 pm and is filed under LD #22. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.