One thing that comes to mind that I've perhaps learned from making Outworlder is that you should make the player learn as few things as possible and give them multiple abilities based on what they learn. In Outworlder this is achieved with the jetpack. All the player needs to learn is that the main thruster is the most powerful (this is learned via the graphics) and the side thrusters can rotate, suck and blow. Once the player knows this, you can give them as many abilities as you want that make sense and are easy to control and the player will know how they work and how to use them.

Video of Side Thrusters

The jetpack has to provide all the gameplay in what is admittedly a short game. It can:
Fly w/ Main Thruster: Main thruster pushes the player up. Limited manoeuvrability.
Fly w/ Side Thrusters: Allows the player to (almost) hover when not flying forward or back. Forward or back movement is fast.
Fly w/ both: Fly higher quicker and better manoeuvrability.
Blow: Blows small rocks forward, potentially damaging enemies. Can also blow back Scuttlers.
Blast: Uses all main thruster fuel. Launched player up. Unearths small rocks. Damages nearby enemies.
Suck: Sucks up rocks in front of the player and stores them (number storable depends on number of Fuel Cells collected). Can suck up Scuttlers for a short time also.
Shoot: Shoots stored rocks or Scuttlers, potentially damaging enemies.


Side thrusters blowing rocks and partially extended.


Side thrusters fully extended.

What would probably be even better would be some way of combining abilities at the same time. That would extend the design concept I spoke of further. For now though, the abilities that are there give the player some freedom to create unique situations/solutions.

I also feel like most core aspect to a game should be inherently fun. As Gaheris commented in my first journal entry, jetpack gameplay is typically automatically fun. The basic act of simply playing the game should be fun, even without doing the things that the developers spent probably the majority of their time trying to make fun and interesting.

Despite my own opinion of the game being like a roller coaster so far throughout development, I'm overall pretty happy that I don't hate it completely yet and I'm actually really looking forward to playing the finished product. That said, I'm extremely keen to start making another game. I'm thinking after I've finished Outworlder I'll work on an engine/framework for a short while using the same things that I'm using now (Ogre, PhysX, FMod, etc), but giving me a much cleaner and more comprehensive framework for developing another game. At that point though I'll probably (hopefully) have a job, so it might take me longer than usual.

This week I'm going to do a lot of work on Outworlder because we've scheduled the Beta release for next week which means that's when that assessment is due for us. It's not worth a whole lot of marks, but I really want to get things finished.

Hopefully by then superpig will have got the avatar uploading working :). If he does then maybe I'll make the game that I thought up for 4E6...