Dev Notes - Wreck at Delta Blue

Now that Ludem Dare 50 is finished (at least, the ratings are out), I can give a post mortem of my entry to the jam. Unlike some of the other entries I have done for game jams, this may have been the rockiest one I went through. Hopefully I can explain well. 

I was made aware that Ludem Dare was happening probably an hour or two before it started. So, I had no idea what to do as an idea. It started with me 3d modelling a space ship, and I pretty much did that for the first day. That, and try to think of an idea to put the ship into. While I was wanting to enter in the "Compo" section, it was clear that I would not make it in time for that. I kept going as if I would be able to, even past the submission time for Compo.

About 16 hours in, I chose the idea of flying in space, and avoiding objects. There was the plan to score "points" for going through rings and more points for going around junk or asteroids. However, the clock was ticking, and I was going on little sleep at this point. Instead, I chose to make the player "investigate" a ship wreck, and have the player collect samples.

One thing I focused on was making the controls nice... for a flight stick. I wanted some "realism", where the lighting on the asteroids made it hard to see directly, and the flight controls would simulate flying in space. A major thing I also focused on was getting the game to work in Godot 4. I had ported a test project before to the updated engine, but I wanted to try a more "complete" test. At the time, the engine was in Alpha 5, so there were a lot of bugs. Some graphical settings were not possible to do, as well there were issues with using the UI. For example, I had to press Alt-Tab often to get out of a "stuck" state when using the Inspector.

Ludem Dare gave the opportunity for me to get some good feedback on my game. While unfortunately I wasn't able to make what I had hoped, I am able to take the opportunity to see where things worked, and where things did not. I'll just do a blitz through the common problems I heard from the game that players experienced (tl;dr: I wanted to add most of this, but ran out of time):

• Engine was an annoying sound / no feedback with the engine starting up. I wanted to add feedback, as well I wanted to add music. However, I was running out of time, and thought to quickly throw in that sound about 15 minutes before the final playtest. I could have not included the sound, and opted out of the "Audio" category, instead of using that long engine sound.
• Can't tell how fast the player is going. I was going to add a speed UI element, but ran out of time to look into it long enough. I would have likely just needed to check the "linear_velocity" of the player's Rigidbody3D.
• Weird graphical issues. This was an issue with screen-space reflections, due to an engine bug. It was removed in a later patch.
• Hard to tell what the samples are. I was going to make them more detailed, and even add subtitles for when the player collects them. They were originally rings (internally, they are still called that), but I changed them to samples pretty late on. It would have been more interesting too, but ran out of time to add more interesting stuff. I mostly wanted to get a "working" core game out there, using the Godot 4 engine, before the Jam deadline.
• Audio loop cuts out. I rushed the audio out, and therefore didn't loop it properly. When I thought I fixed it in 1.1, I clearly did not. I should have done better checking for that.
• Couldn't tell where the player is going / actually flying to the planet / getting a "TURN BACK" warning. I added the "TURN BACK" system to try and inform the player where the "play area" is, so they don't go too far away. I knew I would not have the time to make the planet to scale, so I didn't want them going to the planet. Originally, they were going to fail if they went too far away. However, I didn't know if the player would be able to tell that was what was happening. Instead, I was going to add an arrow underneath the "TURN BACK" UI, to tell the player where to turn back to. However, like most of the other issues, I ran out of time. There are Godot template projects out there that do this, and I could have easily done a "look_at" function. The only challenge is having it display on a viewport texture.
• Doesn't fit the theme ("Delay the Inevitable"). It was hard trying to figure out how to get the theme to work. When the idea was originally just to collect points from going through rings and flying past asteroids, it would kinda work for it. But after the idea changed to the final form, I was trying to get the theme to work with a narrative in mind. I didn't have the time to add that in.

So what did I learn from this project? To think about joining an event like this ahead of time, instead of joining at the last minute. To improve on finding an idea to use for a game, instead of wasting a day figuring it out (hard to do this). To scale back on some ideas, and maybe not try to make something big in an alpha version of an engine. To manage time better. But most importantly, to get proper sleep and eat well. I did not do that well enough for the whole game jam, and I stressed way too much over it.

Now, the future. I don't know if I will be taking part in another game jam, at least for a bit. Clearly, I stress out too much from them, and put too high of expectations on myself, at the cost of the player's experience. Additionally, I think I am done of this project. I was looking into reworking this one, but I might be burnt out from it. Instead, I'll take what I learned, and use that for a different project. I have been working on a game behind the scenes, so who knows if that will see the light of day! I am excited to see the direction Godot 4 goes, and I will continue to test it out, and use it for future projects. Thanks to everybody who have played this game, and gave it criticism!

-Alex