Crankin’ it on my first game jam! Here’s my score chaser #PlayJam

I just made a game in 24 hours! This was my first play jam! I’m a bit excited, even though going into it as a solo dev and knowing I won’t have a full weekend.

I didn’t know what to do with the topic of the jam at first — I hoped for something more… chaotic? Because I’m a bit obsessed about thinking what can one do with the crank. But crank it is! At first I wanted to focus on the crank/fake duo (I think that Osuika’s games are kinda close to what I was thinking about) but then I focused more on the cranking… and the idea was there: something exciting but also tiring. A score chaser game!

While coding I was kinda nervous about all the work I need to do (aside from playing with the gamejam funsies and checking Discord), so I stylized the game as a critique of toxic productivity (aside from working it into the visual style, I found an article about hustle culture and sprinkled some quotes over game over screens). It’s cheap but that’s what I can do in 24 hours, half of which I spend commuting, sleeping and playing Fortnite finale ;-)

Mechanics

Having just few hours to think about it, I just replicated the crank’s movement on screen and the worked with it:

• the main mechanic of following a pattern is inspired by the electronic game Simon that I only know second-hand — just instead of four buttons and longer and longer sequences, there are variably-sized parts of the circle and various complications
• I wanted to have a finer scoring mechanic than just HIT/MISS, so I count frames spent in the right place. I added action-style numbers to make it more visible.
• I wanted to have a fail state — I used lives mechanic without much invention. If you completely miss a step in the pattern, you lose a life. After a successfully completing a level, you gain one.
• Each level is parametrized — it has a specified number of slices, the sequence has a specific length (and is generated randomly), it has a specific speed (in number of frames per action), a can rotate either linearly or randomly (base rotation is random).

What would I do next?

• Make the beginning more interesting. When playing it for the 30th time, the first level isn’t what it used to be.
• Gaining lives after the level feels maybe too generous? Especially if it has only one or two patterns.
  
• The game is quite easy — it would be great to have more to work with the difficulty more precisely without making it unjust (eg you lose because some slowdown, a bad combination of parameters early in the game etc).
• Score is multiplied by level and that’s nice, but perhaps that will lead to wildy different playthroughs. More importantly, it greatly diminishes all the perfect moves made in the first 80 % of the playthrough. Perhaps I add some kinda of critical success when hitting more than 90 % of the time? And critical failure that makes you lose points for staying there only a bit or completely missing it.
• I’m not sure how much I’m okay with the sounds — some of the sounds overlap too much, and the music may clash too much with the gameplay. I tried adjusting the beat to the varying speed of the sequences, but the changes occur too frequently and that makes the music unpleasant.

Any feedback, please?

Please, let me know what you like and what you don’t! I’m not sure if the ingame instruction are clear — did you get it quickly? Did you enjoy the style or mechanics? What would you do differently? Let me know :)

Thanks for reading this! Have a great day!