Generation Ship Post Mortem

Our game

Our game started as one idea and changed many times through development. After some not-so-good entries on former LDs we strongly decided to use Unity this time. We’ve started to learn it some time before this LD especially for this one purpose. And everything worked out well, I suppose. Somehow this Ludum Dare wasn’t nearly as stressfull as former ones, even though we were struggling with ideas elaboration a lot.

We’ve started with an idea to make a puzzle game about a giant abandoned fleet of starships, endlessly slow moving to there god-knows-what destination and one man, who tries to reach one special ship by managing different ships on his way. Core of the gameplay back than was all about docking ships together, connecting them and their tiny ecosystems in order to change this little worlds. It was a not-so-straight development of out theme, Connected Worlds. I thought it was one smooth idea, but then we discussed it and understood that it was pretty much too simple, it seemed more complex than it really was. So we ended up with a game about only one ship and all the living things aboard it.

First time using Unity for such a complex thing terrified us, especially after our former entries, which ended up pretty undone and later on abandoned. So we tried to make our game a 2d side-scroller. In half a day we would say “Fuck everyhting, we want to make something big and cool”. So we moved to a 3D state.

First glance on 3D version

Some time ago we realised we are getting well, we have a solid gameplay, we have a good start platform thanks to Unity and were thinking on how to make our game better. And here goes AI. We were looking for a voice actress for a whole day, asking on LD IRC channel, asking our friends to participate. Anyone to participate in our project for free. And than we found Polina, the magnificent voice of our AI. We’ve written all the phrases in a short period of time and she made a voice-over and added filters. Our AI got her voice.

That was truly a great experience after all, not only to take a part in that competition, which happened trice before, but to actually finish a game, to see how it growth even more than you hoped to see. Everything went perfect this time and we regret nothing.