Planning

The theme that was announced for the game jam was "Sacrifices have to be made" which made us originally think of a few different ideas for a game, one being based on the Incan/Mayan Empire requiring you to manage you cities resources while still being able to sacrifice members of your work force to appease the gods. The goal of that game would have been to build a monument to the gods that when built would no longer require you to sacrifice workers to appease the gods.

Another idea we had before we originally settled on Hexago was a game base on the phrase "I don't have to be faster than the bear, I just need to be faster than you". Basically, the idea of the game was similar to temple run but with the twist that whatever was chasing you would eventually catch up to you unless you were willing to sacrifice other people running from the monster periodically.

We then settled on the concept of Hexago which instead of sacrificing humans you would have to potentially sacrifice certain game tokens in order to possibly get a better score.

How to Play

Hexago is a puzzle game in which you have to move tiles on the board around in order to possibly get a higher score based on the rules each tile has linked to them. Each hexagon has a certain rule associated with it that determines how many points it either gives or takes from the overall score.

Examples include:

Green hexagons are worth 1 point on their own but an extra point for every green surrounding it.

Red hexagons get +2 points for all adjacent red hexagons but -1 points for all adjacent green pieces.

Blue Hexagons get a +1 points for every unique hexagon touching it including the wall.

Tan hexagons get +1 point for every congruent tan hexagon.

Pink Hexagons double the scores of evey hexagon adjacent to it.

Artwork

In terms of artwork for the game there isn't that much of it. The most complex artwork that was made for the game was the animated title screen which had hexagons floating back in forward throughout space. All artwork that was made for the game was created by Dylan Plomondon.

Contributions

Rome wasn't built in a day but this game was built in two. I wanted to make this special section to spotlight all the people that actually created hexago.

• Miles Wood

• David Im

• Johnathan Griego

• Dylan Plomondon

Struggle

Like a lot of our previous games the main challenge we faced was time but in this case the issue was we didn't have a lot of time to work on this project, so we had to go through the phases of development extremely fast. This meant we had to come up with and settle on a main idea for our game with a crunched time frame while still coming up with an idea that was both intriguing and practical for the time limit.

Otherwise everything went well as we had just enough people working on the project to complete it as well as not face the issue of too many cooks in the kitchen.

Result

At the end of the designated 48 Hours we had to work on our game we sent it in to the Ludum Dare website so it could be judged by the audience of gamers. Overall we didn't do that bad, we even made the front page of the website for a little while. However, we didn't receive a high enough score in order to be qualified for any of the categories for rewards.

Overall, the comments on the game were extremely positive with only constructive criticism (a truly rare occurrence). The reoccurring issue that everyone stated with the game was that it was way too easy and that if we would have incorporated possibly a goal score for each level or an extra challenge per level it would have been more interesting of a game.

If you want to play the game you can play it online at https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/hexago.