TL;DR: Somehow not a complete failure.

I’d basically written my game off as being completely terrible. It evolved from being a simple test of the game loop, and I basically felt like I did it because I had painted myself into a corner. However, there seems to be a lot of love for the game. A lot of people think the mechanic is interesting, but the game is too simple. It probably is at that.

If I were to do it again, I’d refine the mechanic by making the planets “stick” together instead of disappearing. This would change the difficulty curve of a level: instead of becoming harder and harder as the level went on, you would balance that somewhat by having a much larger “planet” with which to smash the smaller “left over” planets. One person suggested that I stop the planets from entering too tight an orbit, which was something I was considering, but the game becomes simply too difficult. With the planets “squishing” together, I could decide to make the planets bounce off the sun or keep distance some other way like suggested.

I didn’t tune the difficulty curve of the levels enough I think. They become slightly too difficult too quickly, which I think was picked up on.

On the sound / graphics front, it was noted that I had no sound and the graphics were very minimal. I definitely wanted a refined “fun” mechanic before I moved on to the more visceral aspects, and I just didn’t get there in the end. I’m actually far more confident in my ability to fine tune the graphics and sound than I am in game design, so that’s where I was concentrating this LD (and I will probably continue to do so in the near future).

However, one unforgiveable sin was having no sound at all. I really should have had a minimal soundscape and sound effects. I was disappointed with createjs’s sound capabilities. I was hoping I could pipe through sine waves and I couldn’t. I really wanted that minimalistic vibe, and I really didn’t want a point when I was putting sine waves into an MP3 and playing that.

I could also have chosen slightly more representative colours for the planets, the sun, and space, although, being firmly in the ludologist camp, I actually feel happier that they’re not representative — I want the game design to talk to the player, not the graphics. That’s one thing that’s great about a game like Osmos or Eufloria: You can be at planet-scale or at microscopic scale, it isn’t clear, but the behaviour of the system shines through. However, the bigger problem was I did nothing for the smashing of the planets. Disappear or not, they really needed to have a visceral impact on the player — the thrill of catching two planets in orbit and then having them smash together needed a far bigger pay-off than I was giving (which was none). It’s a lesson learnt though: a simple visual flourish actually has a huge effect on the game design. I wouldn’t have said that before this competition.

In the end I had a great time, and really want to try again, and that’s really the whole point, right?