I'll continue a bit upon that previous post. Let's elaborate a bit on the end product, just a bit. I'll be uploading it to itch.io soon-ish, but let's gum about it a bit first.
So the initial theme was Robinson Crusoe in Space. We wanted to stick to the theme "Life in Space", and avoid "Deathbringing in Space", but that was just our design choice.
Of course the initial plans were crazy big with a planet with complex ecosystems of flora and fauna, and some exploration thrown in the mix. We quickly started to cut features, 'cause "the last 10% is 90% of the work" or something like that.
Eventually, after the new year's we were settled on the final concept: An alien creature (alien = not human) shipwrecks on a planet. There are plants whose fruits you have to feed to flies to make them grow. The goal is to not kill the planet, and to grow a single fly big enough to fly home with it. We decided that the feature list would not grow from that.
We did cut features from that, though. And it was all for the better! There was no an infinite bag of fruit that the alien carried with them, and there was just a single fly. You couldn't hurt the planet direclty, but you could ruin its atmosphere with too many fruit spore. We told ourselves that we'd return some cut features if there was time to spare. Of couse there wasn't, but we can always continue this project in some form in some point the future, so there's always hope.
We wanted to apply a gravity like in Angry Birds Space. I do remember being excited about how to implement that, that's for sure. It didn't end up playing a huge role in the game, but you can achieve a game over via leaving the gravity field.
The one neat thing that I like was the camera. You'd run around the small planet and the camera's position and angle would be fixed on you, not on your environment (see "Yoshi's Island's Raphael" in the second post of this thread). I was really excited about that, and how that would - especially with some interpolation mixed in the parameters - lead to some potentially disorientating visuals. I think it turned out great, but I'm sure you could do so much more with a camera like that. (Now that I think about it, a 2D Descent could have a camera like this :P)
Well, that's it for now. There's still a couple of hours left of the jam. Make the most of it, everyone :)