Hello there!

I'll start by saying hi :wave: This was my first game jam and it was a blast. When I started I planned to go for the 72 hours. At the time my expectations were that I would overscope and run out of time as I usually do with small projects. I started solo with plans to have some friends join in to make assets, but quite the opposite happened. After day 1 of the jam I realised that I had scoped so small that the gameplay was essentially done after 15 hours. That was quite a surprise to me and as a result I changed my plans, got rid of any assets that weren't created by me, announced to my friends I was going full solo and prepared for a long jam day 2 after some sleep ofcourse :sleeping:

My thoughts going into this

Quite often a game is designed to get you excited and reward you enough to keep coming back for more. I decided that this wasn't the rule and tried going in a different direction. Rather than exciting the player, I focused my efforts on bringing down the excitement and relaxing the player. A lot of this I can attribute to the music and sound effects I made with some degree of experience and the almost completely greyscale art (with much less experience). But what easily goes unnoticed is the design decisions of the gameplay itself to evoke that mood. I guess I'll introduce the game here and the words can wait:

Lost Cluster is a game where you hopelessly roam around a large, randomly generated asteroid field in search of batteries to keep your ship active. As your ship weakens your visibility drops until you cannot continue. It's really that simple.

Gameplay to create mood

Alright back to those words. Like I said, the intention here was to create a mood of relaxation rather than excitement. Given that statement, I don't expect anyone to play this many times. Once or twice is enough for the intended effect. You'll notice that I've left things rather empty and spacious, it's just you, the asteroids and your constant struggle to keep yourself going until finally the lights are out. I wanted to avoid adding in extra things like enemies or hazards as these distract from the mood I was trying to create by giving the player more to think about, and also partially due to computational reasons. I know these things would be useful tools to increase play time but that really wasn't the purpose here. Survival isn't really the objective, even though it seems like it is. I will point out that it is technically possible to survive forever but due to how much information is restricted and the nature of randomness, it is likely you will only last about 5 minutes max. It wasn't intended to be hard, but it wasn't intended to win either. Essentially, "not surviving" is the end goal here which is a bit hard to rap your head around but it is.

What I've learned

• Quite a lot actually, especially about my own limits. I certainly thought I wasn't capable of doing anything I could enjoy within 2-3 days, but here I am.
• Admittedly, I am aware the control scheme could have been slightly better. I was running under the assumption that pressing up to go up, left to go left, etc. was intuitive but eventually I saw that it wasn't. In this particular genre I learned that what I should have done was have up to go forward and use left/right to steer. I would disagree that the controls as they are now aren't smooth, definitely once you get used to that difference in controls the movement is much the same as it could have been if I'd gone with that second schema.
• Honestly, I know very little about making the art assets for a game. Starting with greyscale wasn't because I was thinking about the mood rather just thinking about my lack of experience in creating art. At some point, with much of the assets made in greyscale I began experimenting with colour and it just so happened to be on the battery asset that I realised how much just a small amount of colour could affect the mood via contrast with its surroundings. Consider my mind boggled.

Links

Lost Cluster: https://raymoclaus.itch.io/lost-cluster It can be played in the browser here but because of the amount of objects active at a single time I've had to reduce a couple of visual effects for the browser version. I've included a downloadable Win executable in a .zip on that page if you don't want to miss out on those visuals. For those without Windows, don't worry you're not missing a great deal, just a couple of small animation and particle effects. Here's another link just in case you're a member of Newgrounds. I used to post my music here a lot so I thought I should try uploading my first solo game here too: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/697212