Ludum Dare 39 - Universe Hopper

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Ludum Dare - Itch.io - Newgrounds

Made in 78 hours for Ludum Dare 39's 'Running Out Of Power' theme. 

Click and hold to use your space grapple to find your loved one before your fuel runs out.

Postmortem:

@FlorinGusa: I think the project went well, we had a lot of fun putting the game together and coming up with game mechanics. We learnt a lot, at least I feel like I did. I'm proud of what we've accomplished with the game and looking forward to doing it again. I wish we spent more time on organizing code because almost everything kind of turned into chaos near the end. I'm also really proud of the other people who worked on the game, we kept each other from wanting to give up and there was always a great atmosphere. 

We also worked really well together, we kept each other updated on things we were working on and never really stepped on each others feet. There are a few things we could have done better however, I really regret not making more levels and adding more content towards the finish line. There are many ideas that the others and I had but never got to adding them. I feel like we should have worked more on the  sound effects side of things, the music felt perfect but the sound effects lacked for me. We should really focus more on sound next time around. Overall I think this project was a great learning experience in both teamwork and game development, can't wait until the next jam! 

@Sanojian:
This time around we split up our source files and notified each other whenever we made changes.  This cut down (but did not eliminate) time-eating merge conflicts.  Conflicts are almost inevitable in a project like this where all code is created from scratch but an avoidance strategy is hugely preferable to the dreaded git merge conflict error message.

Big timezone differences between members don't make things impossible, but they really make it harder.  We did not agree on a set time to work together so some of our members completely missed each other for the entire first day.  This led to some disagreements on the direction of the game, hard feelings about left-out ideas, and wasted development time.  Next time we should probably all agree on a time near the beginning to sit together for at least an hour and talk about ideas and come to an agreement.

@LaxVikingGames: As the artist for the project, this was my second Ludum Dare with the SCS team. I enjoyed doing the art, though I had far less time to contribute to the project than I did with Infectoids now that I've started a day job. Thankfully to make my job easier, Florin and Jonas supplied me with all the temporary art that I could style at my leisure, bringing you the game you see now.