oddpotion

So LD39 happened the other day...

*looks at calendar* SO, LD39 happened a week ago and I promised a Post Mortem. Ok, so I didn’t promise but I did say that I would! Power Insufficient is, at it’s core, probably closest related to 4X games such as Stellaris, Endless Space and (the only 4X game I’ve ever played, really) Master of Orion. Basically, you spend resources sending ships to certain locations to gather more resources so you can send more ships to more locations so that you can one day expand to rule the entire universe. At this super basic level I think the game succeeds. You can in fact spend resources to send ships to certain locations to gather more resources so that you can send more ships to more places and eventually expand your civilization throughout the universe.

So what went well?

Tools This time I decided to go with Unity instead of html5 tech and I believe that was the most important decision I could have made. It helps that I have been fiddling around with Unity on another personal project for a couple of months. Unity allowed me two things that I wouldn’t have had the ability to do if I would have stuck with html5. The first is that Unity allowed me to code less and design more. When writing my entry for LD38, Totem, much of my time was writing infrastructure shtuffs even though I was using the Phaser framework. With Unity, even though I do think the code is a bit sloppier at no fault to the engine, MUCH more of my time was designing and coding the gameplay systems. Time management As soon as the theme was announced I took a walk. I took 10-15 minute breaks very often. I didn’t code the entire time! I allowed myself to get distracted a bit, but only a bit and not AS often as my break taking. I believe this allowed me to stay “limber” and less stressed. It also helped that I... Kept a small scope Before I had even written a line of code I made the decision to do a few things: Have a depleting “energy” bar. Have a bunch of randomly generated stars and have the ability to send ships between these stars to increase the amount of energy in your energy bar albeit at the expense of some of the energy up-front. At the beginning the game wasn’t even 3d. It wasn’t until day 2 that I had decided to go 3d with an orbital camera! This, along with tool selection and time management, gave me a clear road map of features which I could then tackle without getting lost or side-tracked.

What didn’t go so well?

I said time management was something that went well but I ALSO think it’s something that could have gone better. While I am happy with taking breaks and often and just ultimately trying not to force things, I also think I slacked off just a bit TOO much. In hindsight if I would have pushed myself just a little bit further I believe I could have improved the end-result of the game a LOT with minimal effort. Maybe a few more ship types, random events, better visuals and music. There are many things that the game is lacking. The menu is ugly, the graphics leave a lot to be desired, the music is non-existent though I am still really happy with the voice-overs. =D What I’m getting at is that there are things that I could have easily implemented in the time allowed if maybe I DID force things just a little bit.

Conclusion

That’s right! I think I’m finished with the game! The game is called “Power Insufficient”. I know, I know. It’s a horrible name but.. it’s all I got at this point! Here are a few screenshots. I’ll be posting a more in-depth post mortem later today or tomorrow after submissions are in and tallied.

So it’s day two of LD39 and I’ve been busy. Which... is the cause of the lack of updates.. Either way, it’s happening now so! So far I have pretty much the entire game finished. The base gameplay loop is there, it’s been balanced a *bit*, and it’s playable. Yay! The few things i still need to do are some models for the two ships in the game the “Harvester” and the “Mother Ship”. The Harvesters are the little ships that bounce back and forth between stars gathering energy. (The Mother Ship only appears when the player decides to migrate to a new star.) I also need to do a model for the icon that appears over each of the players home stars. And then I will need to come up with some UI sprites, mainly just a button, and then hook in the game over screen and it should be “done”. At that point I’ll be happy enough to just tweak things. Though I will probably prioritize the main menu screen as right now it looks horrible. I would really like to make the game look nicer in general but I’m not sure what I can really do. I’ll probably just mess around with some post-processing effects and whatnot. Speaking off how the game looks... this is how the game looks!

Whoa! I just realized I didn’t make a theme announcement post! Oops. Well. It’s a bit late but... the theme is “running out of power”! All in all not a bad theme. Not too vague so it’s up for broad interpretations but also not too direct as to restrict ones interpretations. So how did I interpret the theme? So I imagine humanity is no longer tethered to it’s home solar system anymore. How much power would a civilization of that size consume!? Where would they get this power? Well from whole STARS, of course.. duh.

So, just after midnight here in sunny ole’ Seattle (Hey, it’s been super sunny here lately, ok?) and I almost have all of the base mechanics implemented. The game will basically be a Master of Orion clone for toddlers, at least in comparison. You will start off located around a “home star” and everything is great! Except your civilization is quickly running out of power and you NEED to do something about it. So what do you do? You send ships to other near-by stars and strip them of all of the power, leaving them a bleak and empty husk before returning home to deliver all of that tasty power to the masses! But it’s not that simple. Sending ships out into deep space costs power and the further away the destination star the more power that is needed. Eventually, like the vermin you are, your civilization will have devoured every last morsel of energy in your surrounding neighborhood and it will be time to pull up camp and set off for a new home star. This will cost a lot of power to transport your entire civilization 100s of lightyears, so again you must be careful. You can also have multiple home stars. More home stars mean larger energy reserves but also mean quicker energy depletion. So that’s the basic gameplay loop. Use power to send ships to near-by stars to harvest energy and return back to the home star. Once returned the energy is put into your energy reserves so that you may be able to send more ships out. The entire time your fuel reserves slowly deplete, so you will have to act fast. So far I have everything but the idea of a “home star” implemented. You can orbit around the “active” star, using the mouse, and then “select” a near-by star. You can then send ships from the active star to the selected star to harvest energy. Each star has a different amount of energy so some stars have more and some have less. It’s not quite “fun” yet but soon. Right now I think I’m going to take a quick break, maybe go for a midnight walk, and then see about implementing home worlds. If I can get that implemented then I believe Saturday(today) will be a lot of art and aesthetic work and then Sunday will be just a lot of tweaking, hopefully. With gameplay balance sprinkled in for good measure. Here’s another screenshot though at the moment there isn’t too much to look at. =P

I think I’m ready!

So here is how I voted.