So I thought I would take a little time to reflect on what I created for Ludum Dare, you can play the game over at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/space-station-alpha

What went right?

Overall I think the tone and the atmosphere of the game was pretty much nailed on exactly what I wanted it to be, a large station that you don't know where everything is, something trying to kill you that starts chasing after you but can be driven away only to come back later.

I really wanted the player to think about their choices, and I think I managed to do that with ways to win the game, resources to manage, pathways you can take, what to fix, when to run or when to fight back. I thought that if I could give the player enough choices then the story they create through their own experience would become richer and more meaningful to them.

What went wrong?

Early on in the coding I made what I thought was a simple design about how the camera would operate, then half way through I changed my mind as I realised it wasn't good enough and would limit the players experience. By this point it was so deeply ingrained into the code that after an hour of trying to hack it out I had to abandon the whole idea and revert back to how it was originally as it was just taking too long.

To flesh out the game environment I started to create more objected that didn't really do anything, and I used the same colour as I did for deactivated/broken objects. In hindsight this was a bad design decision as it made it unclear to the player what was something they could interact with and what they couldn't, and it would negatively impact their learning experience of the game. This ended up having to be resolved by a lot of written descriptions.

Finally the lack of in-game description of what everything was and what you were meant to do! When you're developing something on a really tight schedule it's very easy to get tunnel vision, that just because to know what to do that surely everyone will. Well, they didn't spend the 48 hours making the game and know every last part of the game. I did create a very simple description of the controls but I should definitely have devoted more time to providing that information in a nice clear way in-game than on the terminal... (see below)

What took time?

Doing the level design for the game was probably the single time sink of the entire project, it consisted of hand designing 16 different areas with their own theme, story, and integrating it into the overall design to make it challenging for the player while providing multiple ways to navigate the area. This was probably a full one third of the time I spent on the game.

While I like the effect, creating the terminal which pops up on screen and displays the text took far far more time than I should have let myself spend on it. It was probably a fifth of the total time I spent on the game whince.

The take-away

There was definitely a lot of things I could have improved with the time I had if I thought about it a little more but I'm happy with what I created. I've already drawn up a list of improvements that I will working on and the game will be updated once Ludum Dare 46 is complete.

Screenshots

Level design

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Art work

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Gameplay

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