Play and rate my game!

What was right

• Management. I’ve spent two days just working on my game. I’ve had enough sleep, food, fresh air and even managed to rest and finish the last few mission in Red Dead Redemption 2!
• DevStream. I streamed the whole process on twitch. It was a little bit scary and I haven’t stream with audio and camera for five or six years. But now I’ll try to do it more often.
• “Okay, that’s good enough” - I told this to myself several times during the development. And it REALLY helped to keep things simple and just move forward wthi stuff. You can spend 10-20-40 hours working on “perfect” soundtrack, or you can stop after 1.5 hours and say “That’s ok, I can live with it”. And just move to the next feature. Amazing.
• I made everything. Sounds, music, VFX, UI, Start and end game screen, tutorial, testing, achievements, analytics… That’s my most complete indie game at the moment and I’m happy :-)
• The game is completely realtime and 3D. That is a huge step from my usual “2D turn-based prototypes with text as a placeholder for everything”.
• Replayability. I can’t say that making the game round length so short (60 seconds) was a completely good decision, but because of this, many players can try to play this game two, three or even five times in a row. I was thinking about two tries per player, but I saw 5+ on streams, with full ten minutes of gameplay. That’s really cool!

What was wrong

• Balancing and difficulty. Noone managed to save all the 10 cubes (I think it’s still possible and the main menu tells you it’s not, but still…). It’s way too hard and chaotic. The short game session makes every mistake fatal.
• Playtesting. There was none. And when I saw the first streams with people trying to play my game, I was laughing and facepalming at the same time. It was terrible. They were completely overwhelmed with UI and stuff to do and dying cubes and then the time is already up and everyone is dead. And I thought it is so simple! Some cubes with health and needs, four rooms and just 60 seconds to save them all. But your first playthrough is taking you 30-40 seconds to just get around, click some stuff and it’s already too late to win.
• UI. OMG. Again, I first saw this on the stream. And it hit me. I tried to make everything SIMPLE. I made icons in photoshop and progress bars for each parameter - so you can watch it with ease! How wrong I was… The game starts. You have 4 sectors with 2-3 cubes in each. 10 cubes in total. Each cube has three params with three possible state + health bar. That’s 30 params to estimate at first seconds of the game. Each sector also has three parameters - oxygen, heat and power. They can be turned on and off by three interactive objects. And you can open the doors between sectors and move cubes. And there is also fuel progress bar and time to evacuation timer.

• So… it’s 30 icons, 23 progress bars and 26 interactive objects (which you can HIGHLIGHT with TAB, yay!). It’s easy, right? No. I think I could make a few simpler levels with smaller capsules and less cubes to watch for. And the current game level should be the Last ExtraHardcore YouCantSurvive Boss stage.

• Exhaustion. That was really unexpected, but after 25 work hours at the weekend I was really exhausted. And that completely ruined my work week. You just can’t think clear. Now I understand how important the rest is.And I’ll try to take a day\week off after the next LD :-)

It was very inspiring and entertaining LD. I hope you can find some time to play and rate my game ;-)