Signal Delay Postmortem

Play Signal Delay here!

Friday Night

In the hour leading up to the theme reveal, I was landing a rover on Minimus in Kerbal Space Program, so the idea for a rover game dealing with transmission times seemed very obvious and unoriginal as soon as I had it. Still, my other ideas were way worse, so I went with it. I spent the rest of the night fiddling with Unity wheel colliders, as I’d had very little experience with them in the past. I called it quits around midnight with the game looking like this:

Saturday

Let’s get this out of the way. I am in no way an artist. I was very nervous when I woke up on Saturday, because I knew my idea would require textures for rocks and terrain, which I had never made. I didn’t even really know how to go about making them. For about an hour, I went back to work fiddling with the steering controls, thinking I’d probably leave the solid color look alone.

When it came time to move on to a new task, I decided that the whole reason I do these game jams is to push myself and learn new things. So, ground textures. I took a picture of my kitchen counter, opened it in GIMP, and just started clicking things until I had something that looked reasonable. (The Make Seamless filter in GIMP is awesome). I did the same for a few variations with rocks, and was thrilled with the results.

Moving on to level design. At this point, the intended gameplay mechanic would have the player driving around taking samples from specific parts of the map. I spent a lot of time designing the map, with hills, valleys, and obstacles that would require careful planning to negotiate in order to get to certain locations.

As my last task of the night, I added an articulating arm using hinge joints. It was terrible. I fiddled with it for a while, then gave up and went to bed with it looking like this.

Sunday

I woke up Sunday in a bit of a panic. I had spent most of Saturday on art, which is totally backwards from how I usually work. I sat down, threw away the hingejoint arm, and rebuilt it using configurable joints. These worked much better, though still far from perfect.

I spent the next few hours modeling the rover, adding a nod to Kerbal Space Program, the game that inspired me.

This is where the real problems began. I at this point had a playable game. The level was done. The rover model was done (although pretty bad). The controls worked, and victory conditions worked. BUT, I hadn’t yet added the 10 second delay to the controls. It was easy to do, and as soon as it was done, I realized I had a huge problem. The game was WAY too hard. The first time I played it through with the delay, it took me 20 minutes just to get to the first sample site. There were nine more to beat the level! In a snap decision, I decided to scrap the sampling, and pick up rocks instead. I tacked a basket onto the back of the rover and replaced the dummy “sensor head” of the arm with a grapple. I ended up putting the rocks very close to the rover spawn point, because anything else was just too difficult.

Crisis semi-averted, I threw together a quick menu screen and timer. With two hours left, I had two things left on my to-do list: audio and online leaderboards. But I also knew the 49ers game was getting ready to start, and I was not about to miss that (GO NINERS!). So, Signal Delay was done.

Monday

I wasn’t feeling very good about my submission on Monday, mostly due to the last minute and rushed changes. The HUGE lesson from this Ludum Dare is to implement your core mechanic as soon as possible. It is so terrible to get that far into development to find out that it doesn’t work.

But, all was not lost. The feedback I received was much better than I expected. Hearing from people that have played my game is by far my favorite part of Ludum Dare.

What Went Wrong

• I waited way too long to implement my core gameplay mechanic
• I skipped audio
• Unity hinge joints suck
• I focused on art too early
• I wasted a lot of time designing a large level that ended up being unnecessary

What Went Right

• I learned a lot about making terrain textures
• Configurable joints don’t suck
• My last minute changes didn’t completely ruin the game

Thanks for reading! If you want to check out Signal Delay, you can do so here.