TL;DR I made a game about abandoning a space ship with wonkey controls and I’ve love it if you played it: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=21100

I think it’s safe to say everyone ends a jam with a list of cut features bigger than the game itself. This was my first LD using unity, with a theme I wasn’t thrilled about, but I still think my idea was solid. You’re on a spaceship, there’s no gravity, the ship is about to explode, and there’s only one room that matters: the escape pod room.

The original plan was to construct a multi-level ship, generate a couple of routes through the ship (which could require going and getting other things) and adding a couple of random events. I knew some (or most) of this would never get done, ships ended up being a single level. I never got back to the ship generation algorithm, so ships are literally mazes. And rather poor mazes at that. I wanted to do something clever with the player hitbox, but after getting it to be “good enough” I moved on to other things. I wanted the ship to feel lived in, and even started work on some assets for other rooms (you can see the start of this with the ops room) but never finished that either. The whole game is an exercise in “is this good enough for me to move on to the next feature?”.

Whilst I’ve been playing with unity for a few months now, this is the first finished anything I’ve done with it. I had to learn how to do menus, use multiple scenes, fought stupid compiler bugs. (Can’t thank the good denizens of #unity3d on freenode for their last minute “it works on my pc” panic help) I learned a huge amount about how unity prefabs work, about the sketchup importer. I am going to be fucking ready for LD38 I tell you.

But, I finished a game (and finished it on time). I beat Ludum Dare. There are still some bugs, especially to do with the WebGL version, but it’s a game and it’s there! You can play it (if you can get around the control scheme, which a) was designed for more 3D environments and b) never quite finished, you’re supposed to be able to walk along surfaces and latch on when you jump).

I still think the idea is solid. I think I am going to try to make a version two, resurrect some of the ideas from the original concept, bigger better ships, more interactivity, an art style that isn’t “oh gods I’m running out of time”.