Back again for a third time. These are my results!

Post-Mortem

Day 0: Right. Let's just say that this theme surprised the living hell out of me when it was announced. It was 23:00 in Germany at the time, my plan was to come up with a basic idea until 0:00 and then go to bed. Well, the theme killed me. It really did. I wanted to avoid the obvious ideas such as: "Space in terms of that giant vacuum above us", "Boxes" or anything to do with running. I ended up coming up with 2 ideas. A space builder/ management where you have to build a successful galaxy, with factories and planets and everything, imagine Stellaris meets SimCity. My second idea was more of a a concept. How about a game where every element (enemies, bullets, blocks) all took up disk space and the player has to delete objects to keep the disk space down or you will lose. I developed the space builder idea but the more I worked on it the more terrified I became of feature creep and over scope. I had one of the worst nights in a very long time, I JUST COULDN'T FALL ASLEEP I just wanted to run upstairs and start prototyping to see if my idea is viable but I desperately forced my eyes shut. I went to bed at around 0:30 and ended up dozing off at around 1:30 it was that bad.

Failure of the Space Game I began prototyping with 6 A5 pages in my notebook filled with planning I felt optimistic. But as I as working on the mechanic which would allow planets to call for resources when they're low around 2 or 3 hours in. I realised. I will never finish this game. It was way out of my skill level and I had to forcefully send my project to a halt. 3 hours wasted. I went to the LD and saw all the North/ South American users who I knew were able to work in the afternoon while it was midnight here but it still demotivated the hell out of me.

The Beginning of DOS: I slammed the desk and restarted. There was a lot of back and forth here but I eventually returned to my second idea. However I rethought it. What if YOU were in a game but something is trying to delete you to free diskspace? After some more planning I built my prototype. And this is how it began.

A simple pointer that would grab objects and then drag them to the recycling bin to be deleted. The objects to be deleted were pre-defined by me and this is how I built my levels. I later decided to allow the player to stand on the mouse-pointer (as a compromise for the fact that I couldn't figure how to allow the player to interact with the picked up objects).

Categories:

*Fun: *Messed up the difficulty, still irritates me now. I built the levels until they were difficult for 'me' to complete. It seems like I forgot that any difficulty for the programmer is basically doubled for the player most of the time. A big plus for me this time around was finding a good way to convey information to the player. Something that I failed at before. If only I remembered that tutorial levels are pretty important too! (Stupid Level 2 too damn difficult grr)

*Innovation: *Not surprised in the slightest that this was my best category. Nothing else to say.

*Theme: *I think I should have added a quick sum up of the story in the game so people understood where the "Running Out of Space" bit came to play. I shoe-horned it into my description which wasn't very smart.

*Graphics: *I finally came up with an art style over the post-jam period. Still thinking though on how to implement it properly due to the way my game is built. Otherwise, nothing else to complain about.

*Audio: *STUPID DEATH SOUND RUINED EVERYTHING.

*Humour: *Surprised this got such a high rating.

Looking back at my targets:

I made a post, where I set myself targets for what I wanted to keep in line this Ludum Dare. And looking back:

1. I focused on mechanics and not on content.

2. I scoped down to the point where I actually had left over time at the end for polish (for once!)

3. I am still alive and able-bodied.

So I can tick those off.

*Progress: *Just like last time. I constructed a well made and orderly graph to show my progress since LD40 (my first game <3) and I am happy to say... THAT PROGRESS WAS MADE BAY BAY.

What I've learnt and Conclusion:

As always I have learnt a bunch of stuff. Every LD taught me something new that I didn't know or forced me to get out of my comfort zone. Last time round I learnt about: Prefabs, Tilemaps, Raycasts, Friction and Jumping all of which I applied in this game. This time round I :

1. Learnt a huge amount on animations, I didn't even know Animation Events existed until now.

2. Secured my knowledge on Raycasts.

3. Learnt a good amount on Audio in Unity.

4. Learnt to love delegates.

I will continue to work on DOS in the future as I do truly love my game more so than any other of my previous LD Jam entries. This one has a lot of potential and I will keep working until it is the game that it is destined to be. Thanks for reading! Have a good 4 months until LD43 comes around!