You are running out of space! The game grid is composed of hundreds of hexagons, each of which has an attached timer that starts at a random value. When the timer goes to zero, a dangerous block falls on the square, killing the player instantly. Avoid getting trapped in enclosed chambers of blocks, and your time will increase substantially! Click here to play!

You are running out of space! The game grid is composed of hundreds of hexagons, each of which has an attached timer that starts at a random value. When the timer goes to zero, a dangerous block falls on the square, killing the player instantly. Avoid getting trapped in enclosed chambers of blocks, and your time will increase substantially! Click here to play!

Are Unity standard assets such as this okay to use in Compo games?

Are standard assets such as this okay to use in Compo games?

IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED COUNTDOWN ALREADY, YOU CAN PLAY IT HERE!

Note: This is a re-post of the postmortem on Countdown's Itch.io page, which you can read here.

Game Issues and Misunderstandings

Although I feel Countdown turned out quite nicely considering Ludum Dare's time constraints, there were some things that could have been executed better. For example, the initial release of the game, 1.0.1, had PlayerPrefs issues when the game started up. PlayerPrefs are Unity's method of storing player data, and in my case I was using it to store data on the player's color preferences. (See the “Change Colours” menu)

When the game was first played on Windows or Linux (There was no WebGL version until 1.0.3), all of the hexagons were black, rendering the game unplayable. This was because no PlayerPrefs were assigned yet. Although the game may have seemed broken when booted, the bug could be fixed by entering the “Change Colours” menu and pressing “Reset.” The bug was removed in version 1.0.2 and above by resetting the hexagons to the default color set if no PlayerPrefs were detected. Further issues were fixed in 1.0.3 and 1.0.4, and a WebGL version was added in 1.0.3. The final version of the game is 1.0.4, which is available on all platforms.

When watching the let’s plays of the game, I realized that another mistake I made in the development of Countdown is that I should have made the core game mechanics a little bit more clear, and had instructions available to the player if they got lost. I spent all of the 48 hours of Ludum Dare 42 working on the game mechanics and polish, but I completely forgot to leave instructions on how to play! I'll remember this for future games I create.

Finally, almost all of the comments on Ludum Dare mentioned one thing: the controls. The controls of the game were jumpy, spastic, and unpredictable. There are a couple reasons why this was the case.

The first reason is the geometry of the game. Each angle in a hexagon is 120 degrees, so when the player adds force to the side of the hexagon and gets "stuck," there is a lot of accumulated potential energy since my movement system is using Physics and Rigidbody, not direct changes to the Transform of the player. Just a slight movement can catapult the player across the map.

The second reason is that Physics and Rigidbody can be a bit uncontrollable at times, and since the game was created in a jam I did not have much time to fine tune it.

Ratings and Feedback

I was overwhelmed to see how many responses my game got on Ludum Dare! As of today, I got more than 30 comments, 58.625 ratings, and two let's plays of the game! (Thank you @jupiter-hadly and @saoi-games, I really appreciate it.) The feedback was the most rewarding aspect of my first game jam experience. Thank you.

Postmortem?

Although the development of Countdown has ceased, the game is not completely dead. In the next six months I probably will release a sequel, Countdown 2, to Itch.io. It will fix many of the problems, glitches, and missing features of the original Countdown. Gameplay mechanics that will be included will be an infinite gameplay space, skippable death cinematic, instructions, tutorials, and possibly more randomization and customization settings. I'll post a blog post on this page and ldjam.com when Countdown 2 is released to Itch.io.

Thank you so much for playing my game, I can't even put into words how much it means to me.

Cheers!

If you haven't already, you can play Countdown here. Thanks!

After a long three weeks of waiting, finally the results of the jam are in. They go as follows:

Overall: 43th (3.254 average from 67 ratings)

Fun: 364th (3.242 average from 68 ratings)

Innovation: 180th (3.53 average from 69 ratings)

Theme: 78th (4.149 average from 69 ratings)

Graphics: 485th (2.939 average from 68 ratings)

Audio: 407th (2.754 average from 63 ratings)

Humor: 436th (2.031 average from 51 ratings)

Mood: 421st (2.821 average from 58 ratings)

Thanks so much for playing and rating my game! I'm thrilled that I managed to get 78th in theme for my first ever game jam, and this really encourages me to continue with game development in the future. In case you are wondering, yes, I will take part in Ludum Dare 43 this December, and it will be also uploaded to my itch.io page.

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It. Is. Done. Throughout Ludum Dare 43, we endured many struggles, including two of our team members dropping out. But finally, here is our game - Altar: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

After many struggles, including two of our team members dropping out, our game is done. Altar: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

After many struggles, including two of our team members dropping out, our game is done. Altar: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

Thanks!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/altar-1