Here we are again on the other side of my third Ludum Dare.

Core Meltdown was the result of a very bumpy development ride. While it probably provides a few minutes of fun, it is far from what I wanted to put out. As it is now, you run about clicking on five different objects throughout the scene, trying desparately to hold the increasingly unstable core from melting down. The frantic running around and ~~glitching on the sides of platforms~~ is kinda fun I guess, but here are a few things I would've liked to include:

• Multi-part tasks, such as having to press a sequence of buttons on a panel
• More tasks and decoration in general
• Certain tasks showing a display to complete a mini-game a la Among Us
• Animations on anything at all; the wheel doesn't spin and the lever doesn't flip
• Some sort of visual indicator of where your task is, like an outline that shows through the level

I think if I had gotten to any of these things it would've come out a more enjoyable game, but as usual it was a victim of over-scoping and changing plans.

Overall I still look at it fondly. At the very least I got some practice modeling, and made some mechanics I had never made before. The interaction system being the main one, this actually took four times as long to get right as I was expecting. Turns out you want to catch raycast collisions in FixedUpdate, and use that value for input on Update. Raycasts in Update returns null for some frames, and input in FixedUpdate misses inputs in some frames.

This was a great learning experience and while I don't see myself taking it that far beyond this jam, it provided a potentially fun frantic concept, and some knowledge I didn't have before.

Thanks for reading, and if you want to give Core Meltdown a try, my entry link is below. After some feedback, I went back in and added a mouse sensitivity slider to the pause menu. That's the only difference between the patch version and the jam version on itch.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/49/reactor-core-1