First of all, I want to quickly note that I’ve made another minor revision to the post comp version of Mothership, details can be had at my website blacktriangles.com.

As to the title of the post, I wanted to quickly jot down a second post mortem for my project, this one perhaps giving better insight into what’s really important about what happened during LD19 and why I believe my submission was a failure.

The consensus in feedback has overwhelmingly contained the sentiment that “your project had a lot of potential, it’s too bad you ran out of time.” At first I was inclined to agree with them: the failure I met was with an inability to scope my project to meet the timeline, an inability to execute on the plan, and too many features without enough polish.

I realized the truth, however, after reading a blog post I made a week before ludum dare ever started. I was talking about a platformer I was working on:

If it isn’t fun to jump and run around in a platformer you’ve already failed – regardless of the bells and whistles you tack on.

I reread that today and realized that I had failed with Mothership long before I ran out of time. Even if I were given a week, or a month, or a year, in the mindset I had while developing the game I would not have been able to compete with any other LD submission. Not only did I fail to nurture the fun in my game – I completely failed to identify it to begin with.

I am friends with a very talented designer who worked at Bungie back in the Myth days and while describing to him an idea I had for a game he asked me a simple question that stopped me cold.

“What verbs describe your game?” The question made no sense to me, he elaborated, “What do players do, list out the verbs.” They… move? They fight? They explore… I went on for several minutes before he stopped me again: “Pick one, make it fun. That’s the best way to make a game.”

The reason I thought of making Mothership in the first place was because the original verb for the game in my head was “exploration”. The fun wasn’t in collecting the materials, or even repairing the mothership, it certainly wasn’t supposed to be a crappy FPS. It was supposed to be about landing on an alien planet and seeing something new each time you played the game.

If stepping off the mothership onto the planet didn’t make you feel excited, if you weren’t anxious to see what was around the corner, or felt a sense of discovery – I have failed. I admit, that’s a tall order for two days! No wonder I didn’t pull it off!

Luckily, failure in games is really just an excuse to start a new iterative phase. Each milestone is a starting point as well as a finish line. I have already outlined a few items that I believe will help bring out the fun in my original idea. Wish me luck, and thanks for your feedback, without your insight I would never have gotten this far, nor understood how far I still have to go.