Screaming Cubes postmortem

So, after getting some well deserved sleep I finally had to play my game for a while, other then quick tests here and there during the weekend… and I’m pretty impressed with myself, if my say so, even though there are no potatoes. I’d guess this is my best entry so far, even though it’s plagued with imbalance, few bugs and especially some missing features. I think I’ll probably make a post-compo extended version with at least some of the stuff. First I’m gonna play and rate some of other games, although it’s getting more and more hopeless with each new LD… I wonder when we’re going to hit the 5000 games record 😀

Now, having said what I said, let’s go to introducing my entry, The Screaming Cubes, a scifi flight combat / mining simulator:

This here is player’s mothership, crashlanded on unknown planet (currently shooting at annoying enemy drone). It needs a lot of resources for repair, but luckily the area is rich in minerals and also enemy bases which can contain a lot of resources (and that build drones which can be harvested after some shooting for bits of useful stuff).

So after shooting first enemy, it’s time to raid his base (there is only one that close to player’s starting position that it’s drone will automatically attack) and return the visit… it takes some time to destroy the base, even with the cratering missiles, but there’s a lot of resources and occasionally some free upgrades inside. On the other hand having one close enemy base means you will have a constant if annoying source of missiles and some ore from the drones…. Depends on you.

The simple winning goal that I put in the game is to gather 2000 ore and 2000 uranium to leave the planet… and it takes a lot of time.

There are few things which are really missing in the game, making it a bit too complicated. I managed to cram almost all of the stuff I hoped to get inside, way more then I though I’ll be able to do. But still, some pretty simple stuff which I just hadn’t time to do is sorely missing, namely ability to call your mothership somewhere else, reducing time spent ferrying ores back and here…. Good radar/map is the second missing feature. And of course, balancing, balancing, balancing… I managed to break the game game a bit with addition of engine upgrades… making first version too slow and last so fast you’re going to hit your own blaster shots :/

If you’re interested in reasoning / inspiration about me making this game for Ludum Dare, especially for the “Minimalism” theme, here goes:

I really disliked the theme. Really. Hated it. Meaning of the theme can be interpreted in just a few ways… and essentially every LD game is minimalistic by nature, because there’s just no time to do something really big / complex. So artistic minimalism is usually a must anyway. Gameplay minimalism? I wasn’t interested in design studies on the theme of minimal game play elements (I admit some of the entries using this approach were interesting to look at, but less to play)… other meanings? I just plainly hated it (and admit, had no really good original idea) and therefore I went the road of cramming the element on something I’d consider playable… Didn’t take much time to decide to put together a Magic Carpet style game… although I quickly changed the setting to scifi and after some experiments with Unity terrain and my ability to deform it a bit left idea of doing Elite / Asteroids 3d clone and stayed on earth or well, whatever that planet is called. I thought about making a randomly generated levels (doable, but just hadn’t time) and Magic carpet mirroring terrain style that would leave me without a need to artificially enclose the area (I hadn’t dared to even try this… it would be easy enough for terrain, much worse to sync all game objects etc, so I got stuck with 8 by 8 km terrain).

The overall idea is mostly captured in the game as it is now… wish list contained several more features, like the already mentioned ability to control and upgrade the mother ship, mothership mining lasers, homing missiles, maybe few more types of enemies / structures, making it more tactical (currently enemies don’t attack the mothership, I originally imagined the game as a combat between two mothership / player fighters in the area with universally hostile enemies and little bases). It was way too ambitious for two days (as my attempts usually are) and I’m surprised that it went so well in the end. (Of course, only if you like flying sims and are willing to invest some time to learning to handle your craft and shooting, that it’s way too tricky right now… ).

So to sum it up, what went good:

– Unity… this time it mostly worked as I wanted, with the exception of constant strange crashes of the editor… that were caused by using it mod files – converting them to ogg meant serious size increase, but no crashes anymore… also I was quite happy that I can just cowboy code and put the stuff together in a way I’d never do if I was doing something “real” for the fear of the later problems and optimalization issues.

– Overall concept / idea and chosen goals

– Art style (originally meant to be a bit more boxy, but whatever, it fits anyway, and can be considered minimalistic)

– Mood – I wasn’t sure, but in the end using ultra simple skybox with the simple setting / distant sun and quite dark feel is pretty good (or possibly just grew on me… you’ll have to decide for yourself)

– Craft handling / dogfights – although the shooting is now needlessly hard, you can learn pretty quick and (with some upgrades bought in the mothership) the dogfights tend to be real fun. Handling (don’t let the stupid last time decision to give player weak level 1 engine fool you, buy the level 2 at start of the game in the mothership) is pretty good – and it should be considering the time I’ve spent to patch stuff in it’s physics model.

– Few attempts with autotracker managed to get me three songs that are happily cycling in the background, so this time I even have acceptable audio, both sfx and music.

-and ESPECIALLY: I succeeded in making a game that I myself enjoy and play and would love to make even better :) nice change from making boring commercial casual games that pays my bills….

What went bad:

– I spent a stupid amount of time of making the stupid turrets behave as they should… I hoped for some simple and quick solution without resorting to some more formal math needed for IK… and I got my ass whipped by my fast attempts to hack quaternions and geo math to do what I want (only to find out that my problems were mostly caused by wrong model)… succeeded in the end, but it took valuable time from balancing game

– Balancing (almost not done at all, only when making the flight model), that got broken a bit by the last time addition of the upgrades. It works much better then I hoped, but it is still far from perfect.

– Not giving player enough information (ie beating his head until he realizes what he can and should do) – I made some notes in both loading level and in the main menu, but it was clearly not enough (questions like “why doesn’t the big ship shoot at me”, “oh, I can fly, I though I was a turret”, “what? ore can be mined from terrain with rockets?” and “what? there are missiles?” shows this oversight pretty well).

– not exactly bad, but could be considered so, especially for someone who tries to dig through the entries and rate at least some of them: I made a too complex game that requires some time to familiarize with before it can be enjoyed

Oh, and before I forget….

Want to play and rate?