Play Time’s Over is your basic run of the mill platform game, but of course, with a twist. My use of the theme acts the primary mechanic. Initially the player has 5 hearts and they can run and jump, squash trolls and bust open blocks for extra hearts. Every ten seconds, a timer goes off and a new rule is introduced to make things a bit more challenging. When a player breaks a rule, they lose a heart, plain and simple.

It turned out to be a lot fun to build the level around the rules. The main challenge was that the player gets the rules applied in a random order, so I don’t always know which rules they’d have applied to them at any given point. Overall I’m extremely happy with the way this turned out, but of course nothing’s perfect.

What went right:

• I made some great Art
  • From the moment I drew the child hero, I knew things were going to look good. I recently picked up a new tool for animation: Uni2D. It was a great for bone based animations.
• I used a Tile Editor
  • Unitile, a powerful little asset for Unity, proved to be a fantastic tile editor. I could’ve done a lot more with it if I had used prior to the Jam, but I still got a lot out of it.
• I got feedback halfway through
  • I demo’d my game part way through to some friends. I got helpful feedback that resulted in the creation of the Icons that flash red and shake when you break a rule.

What went wrong:

• I bit off more than I could chew
  • This is such an easy mistake to make. The scope of the game when you first come up with idea is always too broad. Sure you might have time to make that game, but will you have time for polish, menus, bugs?
• I made a platformer
  • D’OH! I really didn’t want to do another platform game (I made a physics puzzle platformer for LD26). It took me about 3 hours before I had an idea I was happy with, and platformer seemed the best way to execute it.
• I had a bad polish to content ratio
  • I’m really happy with how nice things look and feel, but dissatisfied with the lack of content. I wish I had maybe scrapped trolls and the rule for them to make more levels.

If you haven’t played “Play Time’s Over” yet, Click here to play!

That about does it, thank you all for reading. Looking forward to making and playing more games at LD28!

Cheers,

Dan