Lessons Learned! (Mostly How to Minimise Time Wasting)

Overscope Sensibly

If you're like me, you're going overscope your game. There's too many cool ideas, and cutting is hard.

I wanted a dynamic map, lots of puzzles, different rules for puzzles (in the style of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes). I wanted a break out area to highlight the contrast between an incredibly tight tunnels into a large open space, but the time pressure forcing you to choose go back inside.

I wanted it to explore spaces not designed for humans and the relationship between people and those places.

It didn't happen, obviously.

The solution I came to (too late, for this time) is to make sure that the order you develop things in is sensible. I wasted a load of time in the middle of the jam trying to get this control panel | map to work.

Whilst the idea was good, at the time I was working on it I hadn't put in the key pieces for the game - that is, the humming robots. Because my time had to go there, all the work I spent on this (and on generating a desert for the breakout space) was time I wasted that could've been spent doing things that got in.

Such unused desert, many wow

Understand your Black Boxes

Another big area that hacked into my time hugely was not knowing my tools.

The parts of Unity I was well versed in and familiar with went quickly. Lighting, basic raycasting, collision, movement.

Big time sinks went into Audio - I couldn't get falloff working properly and so the fans are silent - I just couldn't get them muting properly when the stopped, and the falloff was all wrong. Similarly - some of the logic for the bots had real issues around colliders not attached to rigidbodies being used as triggers.

These guys were a nightmare

This normally came about when interacting with systems I didn't understand fully - if you're gonna do it, try and prioritise it early when you're less stressed!

Tutorialise

It isn't clear how to interact with my game. I tried to make it clear that there was only one direction that could be gone (towards the door) but the colliders on the screws are too small and it's not obvious. If I had time (say from not making that cool computer) I'd have put an instructional diagram on the wall.

Still! I had fun, and learnt a lot. Thanks to everyone who's played it and I'll be playing and rating as many games as I can fit in!

Anyway here's the mandatory plug plz play my game kthxbye

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/the-probability-of-meltdown-is-minimal