LD30 Post Mortem: Expedition
Hi everyone, thanks for you comments, support and votes!
(for those who didn’t tried it so far, give it a try here)
LD 30 was my 3 LD and my second try at a main event (I participated at one miniLD).
First of all I have to admit, that I voted against this topic, because I had no idea at all what should or could I make with this topic. I didn’t thought of another approach than the positve way. What I mean by that, is that, I only had in mind that the connection of those worlds had to be positve. A bad connection of worlds was absolutely not in my mind, so I only thought what game can I make were connections are important and necessary.
I only came up with a trade – transport tycoon in space.
First the bad things, what went wrong?
Almost nothing and almost all is the answer to that question.
I finished implementing the basic game mechanics 3-4 hours before the deadline. But I had to build planets and ships and I had to name them and place them in the world. So I finished this process about 20 min before the deadline. But now I had give it a name, upload it and make a entry post. Done one and a half minute befor deadline what a smooth landing.
And now the real but. I couldn’t implement all additional mechanics, like sending ships on a mission by selecting them and a click on a destination (of cause there had to be a connection chain to this destination) or a tutorial.
What went right?
I’m pleased with the quality of coding I did. I couldn’t find major bugs and problems till now. Yes, balancing could be better but I didn’t played my game before the release. I had a period where I coded for 2 hours whithout any check if it’s working and when I finished the component I pushed the play button (I used unity) and it worked immediately without bugs or typos in my code. So that’s a big improvement of my skills compared to the LD’s before where I tested almost every line of code.

What could be better or what if I …?
Now let’s be fortune tellers. Maybe if I had started the game from a nother angle and implemented the game mechanic quite earlier it would be possible to add some of the mechanics that were planed. But for every component I implemented, I immediately added the gui for that component.
Research and variation is fine but fewer ships wouldn’t make such a difference for user’s impression but it would have saved me a ton of time that I could use to add more functions.
Summary:
Wow, what a LD. A weekend I didn’t used to recover from the daily life, no I wanted a weekend of stress. And damned I got what I wanted! But it was fun and exciting and I came up with a game that’s better than I thought I would achieve. I was shocked shortly after the announcement of the theme but at the end it wasn’t so bad at all. There are better ones, but you have to live with them. That’s ludum dare!
Oh! For those that didn’t give my game a chance you can find it here. And please vote! Thanks!

