Analytics

Before I write my thoughts on Countdown, I would like to publish today's analytics for Countdown. They go as follows:

As you can see, there was a substantial drop-off three days after Ludum Dare was over. This is understandable, since most of the reviews and ratings happen shortly after the jam. The downloads dropped off much faster, since soon after the game was released I added the WebGL version of the game, which made download no longer necessary. However, I would like to give a big thanks to everyone who downloaded the game! I really appreciate it.

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 (Ludum Dare’s new website, as of Ludum Dare 38) 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!