I haven’t had time to come back to this since Sunday night when I posted the game, so I thought I would throw up a Post Mortem and talk a little about this game.

Making MOONSTAHR:

The game was made in under 13 hours, and really came together quickly. Partly because it was late sunday morning when I started working on it, and I had a real cut off time because of work the next day, and partly because we suck at ideas. Well OK, actually we had a LOT of idea, but this time we were determined to not over scope ourselves and make something more complete than last time. That led to a lot of really neat ideas getting shot down. We started with four people on Friday night, and had no game and several scrapped starts by Saturday night. Then the idea hit us. We had been trying to make a top down 2d game, and I started playing around with sprites in a 3d world. It looked sweet. We talked it over and the idea of a Roomba like planet rover that gathered up resources was born. We talked over mechanics and how we thought the idea was clever because it would beg the question, is the robot the monster, or the humans that made it? Anyway, we wrapped up around 7pm Saturday night and everyone left for home, the plan was for me to code up the game and everyone else phone is some art and music.

What went wrong:

Really my only regret is we couldn’t think of an idea sooner, when we were all together. We had a great music producer in the group (Will!) and he had no theme to go on, so we ended up having to use pre made resources and opt out of the audio judging. I think he would have nailed it with some custom music as electronic and dubstep are his forte. Also Caden had made some awesome pixel art that never got used. With more time we had a lot more we would have loved to add! Also speaking of things going wrong, at like 1am I tried to make one of those cool GIFs that shows off some gameplay and totally hosed it up. Whatever.

What went right:

Despite the slow start all those failed starts and talking about mechanics helped us nail down things and just start coding when the time came. I wanted to take whatever we made and have an Oculus enabled version at the Tulsa Makers mini faire this weekend, so that helped me limit doing anything fancy with camera and spend more time on just getting solid mechanics down and keeping it simple. I was also determined to give this sucker a proper game intro, so a little time was invested in making the intro splashes. I learned how to use the render texture in the UI to play the video and used Unity’s built in animation tools for the splash screen. The mini map was my wife’s idea, and turned out amazing. During play testing for me she noticed that it was really easy to get lost, and it was to hard. So we wrote some intro text about spinning up satellite imagery and kind of just hung it out in “orbit” and had it follow the player while maintaining its altitude and rotation, giving it a sweet look.

Post Jam:

I knew that the storytelling was a little lacking so I built in some code that saved the PC name of the computer playing the game whenever a person won. I didn’t know exactly how I would use this data, maybe like an infographic that we could update as people played that showed how they had contributed to its demise. After dinner tonight was the first time I had any time to sit down and think about it, and will all the feedback I was getting, the number one theme was “hey, the story isn’t clear”. Dang it. Well what is done is done, but I could at least show off the little analytics I had built in, so I started working on it. Holy cow did it turn out sweeter than I thought it would. Mostly because the script I wrote to update an image with text couldn’t refresh the image on the ludum dare site, because it was hosted in wordpress and I couldn’t push a new copy to them. So I thought, hey I can just build and Unity webGL game and host in the built in iframe and then update it server side when someone beats the game. From there I had to learn how to get the image I was updating into Unity, which is actually way easier and cooler than I thought it would be!

Fin:

So thats it! You can check it out here, and feedback is appreciated!