A Years’ Late Post-Mortem (LD34)

Opcode-Powered Shuttle at the end of LD34

The Beginning

Suddenly it was time. I didn’t plan or prepare, I hadn’t coded in a little while. I decided the jam would jolt me back into coding, I also livestreamed most of my development to force me to keep working at it.

The Story

The first evening and morning worked great (Ludum Dare starts at 6pm in my timezone). A few hours on the idea, several more designing the controls (in retrospect, I spent too much time deciding on the structure of the opcodes). At some point, I hand-drew graphics, but threw them out because I could not get my scanner working.

I built the graphics for a few things, started placing them in-game, and decided I needed to rewrite everything. I quit streaming, took a laptop out to a Starbucks, and spent a few hours doing just that. It was a good break, good exercise (cycling a few miles), but wasted a lot of time.

The 2nd evening involved more streaming, things moving and generating.. Now for the game part, the 2nd morning, I didn’t stream because I was fully in crunch-time-mode over the last few hours. I focused on a communications system (which was broken, badly coded, and led to me releasing a game-crashing bug).

The Result

I decided to make something with a huge scope. All my time went into working on UI components and controls. There is no game, but a few mechanics to build a game within.

Positives? I got back into coding for a bit, I got to check out a lot of others’ games because I made sure to rate a bunch of them, and I felt more on track with my life.

It did burn me out though, so much so that it took a long time to write anything about it.. and even longer to actually publish it!


Want to play it? Click here.

Thinking in Orders of Magnitude

I am obsessed with creating a game inspired by the likes of Elite, Space Trader, and No Man’s Sky – all about exploration, trading, mining, combat, etc, and in space. I have given up on trying to be very realistic in terms of celestial masses, sizes, and distances – it’s too much for me to handle on my own – but I still want an approximation of this.

One of the problems with this is simply trying to keep track of huge numbers in mind. (Was my “average” planet 107kg or 108kg?) In an attempt to classify and simplify, I ended up creating a chart that sorts objects into 5 broad classes with 5 size-based subclasses within each.

a paper graph comparing sizes and classes of objects by orders of magnitude

It also conveniently solves a problem I had with trying to keep track of the relative sizes of small planets and large moons, and tiny moons compared to generation ships. There’s a lot of potential overlap between these classes of objects, which is clearly demonstrated. It’s also very nice for setting up orders of magnitude to generate mass or radius values within.

There is a lot of simplification in what I’ve done already, but there is more to be done before I even have a prototype to play with. Perhaps I’ll make a seed-based toy for generating and exploring systems from an overview as the next step.

My Obsession

(This post has been imported from an old blog of mine.)

For years I’ve been thinking about a rocket construction and flight game. Think 2D Kerbal Space Program, but with part design as well as craft design, and some SciFi aspects to it.

picture of a notebook showing my obsession with spacecraft
Just started on the project again and ran into a problem with the physics library I’m using (box2d), so for kicks I decided to calculate how many shapes I might need to try to make a planetoid have a variable surface instead of being circular.

Basically, a grandiose expansion of the concepts of KSP while simultaneously stepping backwards by making it 2-dimensional instead of within a 3D universe. I am a bit more realistic with my expectations than I previously was, so I know I’m not going to achieve it for a very long time, if ever, but it still is fun to think about or poke around with code or draw out some ideas from time to time.