Stickleback Postmortem
What floated nicely:
– Aesthetic. I was quite pleased with the low-poly retro look I ended up with. In fact, it made me nostalgic for an old game I’d love to do a retro remake of; Hunter. Incidently, this low-poly look was a result of the issues I had in the next section.
– Music. ImageLine released a beta version of FL Studio for the Mac which I hadn’t really tested. In the end, it performed exceptionally well and I had no problem knocking a tune together very quickly. Otherwise, I’d have had to use Reaper which, whilst being an amazing app, I don’t feel very creative with. Well done ImageLine!
– Ideas. I really liked the theme! On the train I brainstormed ideas about subterranean building, aka Dungeon Keeper, etc., but switching to the oceans I felt rather nostalgic about 20,000 leagues under the sea, one of my favourite books, so I began to play with themes about ramming ships.
What sank:
– Time constraints. I had to travel at the weekend so much of the time was spent with just the macbook. Didn’t get started until about 10 hrs after the start.
– Stealth aspect. Sadly, one of the major themes was that you would be able to stealthily avoid enemy ships, before speeding up and hitting them on their flank and sinking them. I couldn’t get a fine balance between the risk posed in breaking out of stealth and then speeding up to ramming speed. Inevitably, you end up just staying at full speed to get away from the projectile shots from the destroyers, rendering the stealth aspect somewhat pointless.
– Toolset. We are immensely blessed to have access to such an amazing tool as Blender. However, I had not anticipated how much I relied on the numeric keypad for workflow when using it on my Macbook. Whilst you can emulate it with the number keys, I’d also become used to the positions on the numeric pad. As such, I really struggled with designing objects and navigating the app. Hence the ships in the game didn’t turn out as nicely as the stickleback itself due to time constraints and difficult navigation. Also, I should have packed a mouse with mousewheel and at least 3 buttons…
– Physics. I can haz non-kinetic player? Haha, it never fails to amaze me how much time I end up wasting trying to make the player purely controlled with physics forces and torque before I just give up and accept that the word “gameplay” involves a “game” and that controlling the ship should be reasonably enjoyable.
Conclusion
Whilst I really enjoyed the 48hr compo, I think I may go for a Jam entry in future. Sometimes the extra day (and extra sleep!) makes all the difference to the final entry.
Source: ludumdare.com archive