When LD34 finished, and Sanctuary Station reached #18 in Innovation and #51 Overall in the Jam, I was pumped to try and spin this into a full game. But the first thing to do was to analyse how exactly my game was received, so I dug into my ‘data’ – the LD response messages.
LD message feedback analysis:
- Positive
- Matching the tetris-block available airlocks is innovative and is fun (7x)
- A time pressure mission works to create challenge (5x)
- The people ‘pips’ inside give feeling to the speed (1x)
- Satisfying ‘connect’ sounds are important (no mention, but I like it)
- Visuals (2x)
- Learning curve (+4x, -2x)
- Atmosphere, story (2x)
- Negative
- Pods move too slowly (6x) (-1 who liked it slow)
- Pathing, getting stuck, alignment (3x)
- Visual/Audio gameplay indicators (4x)
- Unknown
- Music (-1x, +2x)
- Camera controls (-2x, reads minor tho)
- Too short (4x) largely a positive, methinks 😀
Quite a lot of feedback! Some minor or specific things not mentioned.
I took this, and my own ideas and went to work to improve!
Post compo
My goal for this Post-compo version was to keep to the general scope of the LD entry, and smooth out most of the ‘bad’ things – to get to a solid core mechanic.
The changes
- A bit faster & smoother: Pods move faster (quite a bit)
- Expanded controls: More mapped keys, and now you can plan multiple moves ahead!
- Patched codebase: Rewrote the worst of the real hacky underlying structures
- Interface: Pimped the interfaces for readability
- Minor extension: Added one additional mission – with aggressive NPCs
- Lots of small things: And they add up too
Improved text interface & new mission.
Try it out! Unity Webplayer and Windows/OSX standalone
Feedback very much appreciated 
The future
Game jam prototype was successful and fun –
Discussed the game with some other game-dev friends, who see potential –
Let some people play and observed their fun and non-fun –
Got a notebook & doc full of ideas, that stay in-theme and in-scope –
I have time set aside to ‘spend’.
Guess I just gotta go for it. 😉
Go! Go! Go! This will be awesome!
Also, I think keeping the space theme would be good.
This was fun, kept trying to get to more missions, but I guess I played through.
Great core mechanic, and simple to learn, hard to master. Took a while to figure out I could map out paths for the ship parts, and plan their movements ahead of time ( and trying to avoid collisions ).
Just needs a few more space marines with flame throwers in there. 😀