Jam Postmortem and future

Well, it's been a week since the end of the jam, so I figure it's time I begin to look back, and look at the future of this project. It's reception, so far, has been about what I expected. Going into this one, I knew it would be niche, probably disliked by a lot of people, liked by a few, and that it was almost never going to be finished on time. When I originally thought up the concept, I threw together a quick concept test, then discarded it because I knew I couldn't do it in 7 days to the stage I would want it at. After talking with a few people and getting enthusiastic responses, I figured, I might as well give it a shot, hopefully get something playable out of it. 

The jam itself was messy. The first weekend was full of interruptions and things that needed doing. At the end of the first night I basically said this is never going to work, and pulled out of the jam. I got convinced that I should at least see how far I could get, see if I could produce some kind of playable prototype. Throughout the entire jam, the flight system was a constant fight to make it work the way I wanted. On the final day, I disabled a couple of the flight features because it was hard to justify how some of it worked from a gameplay side of things. Combat wise, the game behaves kind of like how I want, however a few people have said that things aren't locking on when they should. Have to look at it further, there's actually a bunch of rules in place that set whether they can get a missile lock or not, but some of it was getting very last minute. I also lost track of time, thought I had an extra day to keep putting stuff back in and testing before finishing. By the end of the week, I was feeling a bit scattered. Just a rough week in general.

On the other side of things, the npc ai (as simplistic as it was) more or less worked ok. It still needs some tuning up, but I actually borrow a lot of their concepts for movement from the ghosts in Pacman, from when I made a prototype of that. Surprisingly enough, the planes more or less did what they were supposed too. It was only some additions made for the missile controller that lead to the planes doing that weird flapping style motion that was in the final jam release. But the planes would actually fly to waypoints, and the hunters would ping the player then try and get behind them. The few attempts I had at playing the game had me getting killed pretty fast if I let them get into position. Keep moving fast and they weren't much of a problem though. I have a fair few plans for the AI, outside of the jam, going to spend some time and give them all sorts of objectives they can choose between so they are more interesting than fly between waypoints, or hunt until the player is dead.

The terrain generation was ok, I've done that enough times in the past to simply be able to put something together. It actually looks quite good for what it is (I think). The one issue I was having was that I could not get the planes to respect the collider. I spent a few hours last night stripping the game down to bolts level trying to figure out why the raycasts were going straight through the terrain, even though I'd proven the colliders were correct (fun way to test actually. I spawned a bunch of spheres, stuck rigidbodies on them, and let them drop. The effect was actually pretty cool). Turns out it was a layermask that even though it read correctly in the inspector, was still missing 2/3 of the time. I took it out completely. I do like the cloud generation though. For such a simple solution, it works. 

A large section of work that is partially done involved the whole pickup system, which would have added a lot to the roguelike-ness of the game. While the systems are in place through the flight and combat systems, the pickups themselves were giving me grief, so never made it into the jam project. I never even started on the inventory system, towards the end of the jam it was "anything you pick up will automatically activate. hope it doesn't hurt you" type attitude. 

In general, I do like the idea of the game. My plan is to finish it, probably to a bit beyond where the jam plan ended, but not too far. The reception to the game is pretty mixed, which is fair enough. The amount of people that like roguelikes and dog fighting is probably pretty small. This game was always planned to be an experiment, just in this case, one that I feel doesn't show what I want it too yet. As much fun as I can see this being as a full game, I don't think enough people would play it to be worth the amount of time I'd have to throw at it. 

I've already started to add more to the project, I'm rebuilding the voxel system to better support LOD controls, the npc and player flight controls are being altered to make sure they both behave the same way, and there's a bunch of refactoring going on to clean up the code, make it easier going forwards. I will release updates periodically, I've yet to decide the benchmark for when the game deserves it. Right now the first goal is to refactor the jam code and clean up the main core loop. There will probably be a release once that is done, and then from there, see what's happening.

Future posts will probably shorter. At least I'll work on that. 

Also I still need to think of a name for this game. Never came up with one during the jam, still thinking about it.