I suppose a post-mortem is a bit overdue for my game, I’ve Got the World On a String. You can play it here, if you want. It’s okay. Thanks in advance if you do play.

My initial goals were pretty tame: Make a game jam game in Unity, and spend more than a few hours on the audio. Making a fun game was also a plus. As it turned out, I only met the Unity goal, since that one was pretty much a given just by deciding to do it. I did technically spend about five hours on audio, but I threw away the boss theme I had worked on because it was bad. Oh, and I don’t find the game terribly fun, though it might have some potential.

Hits:

• I’m pretty pleased with the music. It’s nothing spectacular, but for being churned out in under 2 hours, it’s not bad.
• The concept for the game was one that I tried (and failed) making a long time ago, and now I can check it off of my to-do list, as it were.
• I think the player ship sprites turned out pretty good. They read well, at least.

Misses:

• I spent maybe 4 hours on the rope in the game, which is purely cosmetic, iterating through various physics-based approaches that failed in various ways before realizing I could just use a particle system. I also spent most of that time during the first night, and I know better than to focus on aesthetics before the core gameplay is in.
• I wanted to have more enemy types and more bosses, especially some bullet-hell-esque ones to really bring out that core concept of being a shmup with no shooting. This time was instead spent on a rope.
• Not using physics for the player ship really hurt later on (especially with the rope…), and I think the movement would be better if it had a bit of inertia to it. It would also be easier to line up the ship with the centers of planets, so scoring would be more reasonable.
• The mix of 2D sprites with 3D objects and particles muddles the visual style, which wasn’t very strong to begin with.
• Again, the rope. I was hoping it would feel like a rope in Scribblenauts, with basic physics doing most of the work, but I shouldn’t have spent so long trying to tune the various versions when they ultimately weren’t right.
• It doesn’t feel very fun…thought it’s had a few moments for me. Maybe it’s okay.