first concept art

first in game screen!

day one screen

This is postmortem of Space Enforcer and our first Ludum dare

Day one

Idea of the game came to us during short brainstorm. We thought, Why aliens always has to be evil in games? May be it’s people who are bad, trying to destroy each other?  And here comes the concept of the UFO, which enforces peace on Earth with his tractor beam. After brief discussion we decide that game should use unity Physics2D, because who doesn’t like to play with physics, right? There was three possible types of weapons for humans: rockets (player can correct their trajectory), tanks (turn over) and bombers (force them to land, but gently, so they won’t crash).  Last two was kinda tricky, so we stopped on rockets

At first rockets supposed to have their own thrust, but after we tried that out, we didn’t like it. Trajectory changes was unpredictable and unclear. So instead of rocket we made a simple ballistics projectile, which is more common in games (Worms/Angry Birds) and easier to play with.

When we were making UFO controls, we was trying to give player feeling that he controls big spacecraft, not just moving his mouse cursor on the screen. Instead of setting cursor position to UFO we decided to apply force on direction of the cursor. Force is proportional to distance between UFOs location and cursor. It gave desired feeling to controls and added some challenge.

At first our artist wasn’t available and we had to use some programmes art. Game looked like this:

But after his arrival game changed pretty fast. It started to look like normal indie-game (=

At the end of first day we had working prototype with flying rockets, working UFO and tractor beam.

Day two

After playing our game for some time we found a problem: player could just float at the middle of the map and easily redirect all rockets. Problem needs a solution, so we decided to add new mechanics: anti air rockets, which aims directly at UFOs position, tractor beam stamina and people who tries to escape from war zone.

After we did that, we had a choice: made more levels or spend remaining time to polish our game. We decided to polish game: add more sounds, particle effects, animations and improve balance and UI.

Sadly second day was the last for us, because third day was already monday at Russia and we had to go to work.

What wend good:

• Unity particles. Particles always seemed like hard and sophisticated thing, but as it turns out there are not! They are awesome actually, we used them everywhere we could.
• Planning. We didn’t spend too much time making concept, we wasn’t afraid of featurecut, we didn’t make anything twice
• Art and music. They turned out pretty well
• Ability to accidentally kill a man
• 

What went badly:

• Steep learning curve. We played our game too much and didn’t notice that our game become a little bit hardcore and also there wasn’t any tutorial. We thought about  difficulty level choice, but didn’t implement this feature, because we didn’t have enought time to do it properly