When we first started Planet Nanadoo I originally wanted something a bit more Pikmin-ish. It was going to be more about navigating around with these little robots, picking up scattered power cubes and bringing them back. There was going to be a balance between building more little robot dudes and trying to get enough power/resources to build a ship back. Complicated stuff.

Fortunately we started figuring in how long it was going to take to build all of the characters, enemies, backgrounds, et al and realized all of the complications weren't going to fly. We trimmed everything down to just two characters "The Explorer" and "The Locals". Unfortunately there wasn't enough time to make a very elaborate looking base, so I just had to use the regeneration chamber.

When it came to graphics, I called my good friend MarleeZ a few hours too late, to do screens. She was more than happy to jump on it. @Cheldav did the audio for this one (she worked on our previous entry Cosmic Chaos Crunch). We opted to go without voice acting this time to keep the explorer generic. This kinda backfired on me, because I didn't get in a death animation nor sound. So the explorer just kind of disappears.

I made a post Jam version that I want to say is as complete as this game is going to get. Any of the original concept stuff I do for this, may just end up in a sequel. That way there aren't any questions of was there enough time to complete XYZ.

What went right: Even taking a 6 hour break to literally go to another game demo, we managed to get it done. I'm getting faster at doing animations, they're not great but they work quite well. (I think they have a level of adorable I was somewhat aiming for). I got to work with MarleeZ!

What went wrong: Unfortunately the controls weren't as tight as I would've liked them to have been. Unfortunately players wander too much in the dark. I'd like for the beacon to have been clearer. I didn't get all of the animations in in time, so there are small hiccups in gameplay that make you go "???" That darn dot that appears in the center of the screen caused by a light that I've never figured out. >: \