Rim Runner post-mortem

I only downvoted 4 topics in the theme slaughter this time around. Of course, "Limited Space" was one of them. At least it wasn't as bad as "Every 10 seconds".

Whilst the popular option has been to transition to Godot, I decided to keep my usual stack: Unity, Krita, and LMMS.

Theme storming

Several themes around "limited" and "space" got explored.

Package shipping

One of the first was "package shipping" with "tetris" shapes to pack, which was what lead to the final game.

Personal space

Going for a mental health thing was avoiding getting people into your personal space which would deplete your health, but also having to balance it with getting things done. This could have been fun, but got rejected due to being a bit sad.

Something has to go

A more generic idea was the concept of having very small place to keep stuff, and having to make decisions on what to keep and what to throw away. This partly made it into the final concept as well.

World overpopulation

This would have been about the hard choices of keeping the world population down. Which would probably have become quite.... sinister, but also would need a lot of time and thought to keep it on track and fun.

Final concept

Inspired by FTL and Heat Signature I went for what is essentially a space trading game. You get a small ship with a cargo grid. You need to use that cargo grid to add upgrades and buy trade goods that you can sell throughout a galaxy of stars, in order to buy more upgrades.

Your goal is to escape the Space Police that is after you for having stolen the freighter.

Important elements

Police influence

An ever growing sphere of police searching slowly expands, pushing the player towards the outer rim, where stars get fewer and further apart all the time.

Also, once a star has been visited you can't go back to it.

Supplies

The three main stats the player has is money (dough!), oxygen, and fuel. The latter two continuously draining. Visiting a star/station fully refills these.

The player has to trade their way to the money they need to purchase oxygen and fuel upgrades to achieve the full win condition.

What went right

In the end, the concept works. Flying around feels good. The drop and drag system works "just fine".

What went wrong

My initial thought on how to implement the drop-and-drag into the hold of the ship didn't work. I lost a lot of time throwing out the ALMOST working solution and coming up with another one. This meant that a lot of the features I wanted didn't make it in.

What didn't make it?

Flying: Flying was supposed to be based only on acceleration and having the player drift if not under acceleration. This would have made the tradeoff between speed - fuel - oxygen A LOT MORE interesting.

Derelicts ships as extra loot: These would only have been visible if the player was zoomed further in when flying.

Station effects: I wanted to have stations vary their type. What they sold, maybe have a fun NPC that would talk to you, give you optional "quests" to go to specific stars. And some that would spawn a new Space Police search area, making more ever expanding circles.

Stratas: Another gameplay element would have been to make rings of stars, instead of randomly spread out. This would have let the player fly between close stars until they have to move to the next ring out, which would have required good stock of supplies.

Graphics: In the end, the components on the ship ended up being coloured squares. The plan was to have a different graphic for each component / trade goods.

Moar things: I also wanted to include a lot more components and upgrades. With their own benefits and drawbacks.

Component rotating: I also wanted to the player rotate the shapes of the components. That would have opened up to way more careful stacking of the cargo space. I think this would really have elevated the gameplay.

Conclusion

This was my most ambitious project for a Ludum Dare yet. I only have time to work on my Unity skills during jams, but they're definitely getting better, letting me spend more time thinking about good implementations instead of flinging shit on the wall until it sticks.

A lot of time was lost on a single feature, which really hampered other parts. Sound and music was down in 20 min towards the end. At least they're in there.

I ended up enjoying my concept. This one I might actually go back and improve.