Postmortem for RUN FROM SPACE

This is postmortem for ludum dare 42 game Run from ⭐⭐SPACE⭐⭐.

I'll try to describe here development process of the game, and cover things that we did well, and things that we did wrong.

Of course it all began with theme. We got few ideas, but in hour or two we decided to stop on this:

During first day of development we decided that our game will be about the crater that shrink to the bottom. We decided to call it "Hell descending" (actually project and git repository still have this name :D). So in this game you should descend down in to hell, navigate your way thru flying islands, avoid touching walls, which are shrinking to the bottom (no more space!) and shoot out space hell demons.

So we gave task to our 3d artist to draw gun and hook, and i went to work on hook implementation. Here's some video from early tests:

Actually hook felt different back than, I've changed it a lot in release version. The point is that we never actually field confident in hook mechanic. On the next day we've added jet pack, after few hours testing we decided to remove it. We were constantly changing hook length, it's force, and lots of other parameters, that i can't even make up a name for them. For example one of them is "velocity compensation" - if you are using hook your current velocity is constantly divided by some parameter multiplied by your speed. In this way you feel much more confident and smooth in your moves, but this is slowing you down, and movement is not that fast.

I've tried to make some physics accuracy and added inherit velocity for hook itself. So if you are flying right and shooting hook - it will receive same right velocity, just like in real life! It took me around 2 min of testing to understand that this should be removed. Sometimes real physics is just not fun! :D

So at the end of first day we  had something like that:

I wasn't happy with this at all! It seems for us that correctly setup the level, monsters and islands this will be extremely hard! And how do we make player not just constantly falling to win? With such thought we finished first day of development. On the next day I've read some articles and found a way to solve this problem! I don't remember exactly where i found it, but one of the advises that  i found was to play with words of the theme itself. And then i understand - we need  to do a game about space! Like "run from space" :D

***

In next 1 hour some test space level was ready and it became obvious - we should stay in space. Wast spaces was very very good for our movement system. You can really feel the freedom of movement that hook is giving to you if you are not constrained by crater walls

Here's this level in 2h after i created it:

You can see that hook is flying much slower that in release version. And also you can see there that hook is constantly moving you up. I've added this to make moving to platform more easy. But later on we've removed it (i'm still not sure it was good idea). Instead of rope-like swing effect it was adding a bit of levitation to you, so you were much more confident in landing (received lots of critique on it)

***

After that i've implemented some basic steering AI for monsters. You can see on video that they are tend to stuck in groups. To fix it i just added some separation for them, and i worked surprisingly well! Suddenly you even get the effect that they are moving to your flanks! So all monsters AI is just - move to player + separate from other monsters.

First animation test of monster:

Actually there was a problem with animations that we didn't know about almost till release. So shooting animation looks  like that: monster is preparing for 2 seconds and after this he shoot projectile. So in 1 hour till submission end we are discussing the game and i'm saying "Oh, i wish there was an idle animation for monsters" And py_g (she is amazing 3d artist! All assets were created by her in 2 days and i think this is incredible!) is saying to me "It is there! You didn't implemented it?!" After investigating a bit we discovered that this idle animation and shooting was exported as one animation! So there was no preparation animation before shoot :D Obviously it was too late to fix anything so we decided to leave it as is. Ugh! I wish I've had more time to speak with the team...

***

Level was finished about in 1 hour before submission! We just didn't have enough time to improve it. I feel that this is the biggest issue with the game play. We desperately  tried to encourage player to shoot monsters: you need to stand on the ground to reload for only one purpose - I've needed to somehow make you stand still and shoot! (obviously this didn't played that well, you don't need to reload if you don't shoot :D). The regeneration mechanic came from same side. Still i think it's extremely unbalanced, it would take you around 1 min i think to heal for 50%. I don't believe anyone was standing still for such long time ( and if you did i really fell sorry for you!!).

And what i COMPLETELY ABSOLUTE regret is that I forgot about post processing. I was like screaming from pain when on next day I understood that. If you are familiar with Unity you should know that this is super easy you just put a postpocessing behavior on camera, check some boxes and you have almost AAA (almost :D) looking game. Full of anger i just added it on the next day to the post ludum dare version (which is still in development).

Conclusion

So for conclusion i want to say that some mistakes was made. Mistakes that of course were avoidable. We should have prepare game level BEFORE start tuning the game play. When we worked i was thinking otherwise - you need to have a game play and then build level around it. But it didn't work because you can spend weeks tuning parameters down. And if you are participating LD you didn't have that time. So i think level would be restriction, that would have prevented us from infinite parameters change. Eternal theme: too big idea, to small amount of time.

Also one of the best decision that i've made was to made a build for WebGL! First 2 comments on games page was that they weren't able to play win games.And after i've added web support the views counter went up!

At the end i think game was warmly accepted and we received A LOT of detailed and quality feedback, which we are now transferring in post-ludum dare version.

For first ludum dare this was INCREDIBLE experience! Thanks a lot for your attention!