Null Space Post-Development Assessment

So, I saw someone else making a post like this for their game jam and decided I'd publicise the assessment I made of the game. Original thoughts are truly dead. It's going to cover both my process and what I thought of it afterwards. It will contain spoilers.

Overall, I had a lot of fun making the game. It was stressful as all hell and I got 4 hours of sleep the final day. It is probably the most furious passion I've had for a project in a long time. Thanks to mossflower for hosting! Also, when initially signing up I thought it was hosted by an anime Vtuber and it took until maybe the last day for me to find out it was a furry Vtuber, which is completely fine with me but I was caught very off guard.

The primary inspiration for this game was Out There, which is a game I played during my childhood. Don’t think I ever beat it though. You can really feel its influence everywhere. Even unintentionally, because the artist had never played the game but still went with a purple event background. Another key inspiration was Star Wars: Otherspace. The connection is pretty obvious, what with it being a white void with black stars.

Writing

So, the game was mostly writing. What I wonder is if people could tell that I wrote most of it past midnight. In total, Null Space had 3300 words. I wrote 2800 of them on the last day. Conceptually, a lot of it came last minute and was pulled out of my ass. I concepted two beings early on, Rialin and the Bellman. Rialin's path required high sanity and was focused on the idea of unlocking some higher power. I liked it and especially how her event chain was effectively an in-game epic. It was supposed to reflect the player’s journey and imply that the player was now going to become the Rialin of whatever universe they go to. Now the Bellman is where my 2am delirium started kicking in. Because Rialin knows that I would not have made a lowkey homoerotic relationship between the pilot and the Bellman if I was still sane. That route very closely reflected my own descent into insanity.

The game received a lot of praise for the character's personality and the general vibe of cosmic horror being very apt. I agree with these positive comments and I think character personality is where I generally excel. However, I believe a primary critique of my writing is that events are often written as "Do the fun thing, or don't do it". This was a problem that I realised actually existed in my previous game called 'Wastelanders' which can be found on my profile. I think adding extra outcomes would have also heavily benefitted the game.

Another very valid critique would be pacing. I think the pacing was not very good for the story events. The Bellman should have had a couple more events, and perhaps Rialin as well.

Level Design

For level design, I think it could be drastically improved. There were some elements that I am fond of, such as how no matter what path it forces a player to go to a Talisman and an Inverted Star. However, I think overall the spindly nature of the map was a detriment. It may have been good if I made some sort of feature where interacting with a Talisman or Inverted Sun would teleport the player to another one of them.

Speaking of which, teleportation was a cut feature. Originally, if you had your map up, you could randomly be teleported and the chance would increase the lower your sanity. There was also a plan to make the map procedural originally.

Gameplay

So, there’s not really much gameplay. Later during development I realised that it was barely a game, so I leaned into this by moving it even further towards interactive fiction because we both had nowhere near enough time to make such a large pivot.

I think balance is a problem but like, that’s kind of expected for a game jam game especially one that went as high concept as this. 

If I were to continue development, I would probably add an inventory of some form. I realised that because we had no inventory, there was no real strategy. And in-game, while the player does have the choice of interacting or not interacting with a system, there’s not really a reason to not interact unless the game is close to over and the player no longer needs resources. In general, the lack of consequences for interacting with a system remove a lot of strategy.

Future

I have no intentions at this stage to add content to Null Space. However, I think it has an intriguing concept and many ideas I want to return to. I think I may actually reuse Rialin and the Bellman in future projects. If Null Space does ever return, it will be entirely warped and changed. Like a fish. That wasn’t meant to have meaning, fish was just the first thing I thought of.