Body Count drops you on a rooftop over Shibuya's rush-hour crossing with a target list and a limited number of catches. Somewhere in the crowd below is the one person who matches every trait. Find them before the wave runs out.
- Placement
- 6th of 46 teams
- Team
- 4 people
- Jam length
- 5 days
- Playtesters
- 24
Reading the theme
The jam theme was Compact. We read it two ways. First, the crowd itself: thousands of people with different looks, all moving through one small crossing, squeezed onto a single screen so that finding one person becomes a test of attention. Second, the controls: one tap makes a catch, and there's nothing else to press.
The core loop
Read. Spot. Tap.
Check the target's hair, shirt, pants, and bag, find someone who matches all four, and tap to catch them. "ANY" accepts any colour or bag; "X" means no bag at all.Clear. Upgrade. Repeat.
Hit the wave's score target before your catches run out, pick an upgrade, and face a bigger crowd.Catches are the constraint. Upgrades and special passersby are how you buy some of that room back, so a good run is as much about spending them well as about sharp eyes.
My part
I made the music and programmed a big share of the game.
Music
It had to feel Japanese and feel fun. I landed on funk jazz and lo-fi jazz, made in GarageBand.Waves and upgrades
How each wave grows, and the upgrades you pick between them.Game feel
The small touches on every interaction that make a catch feel satisfying.A crowd that stays light
A crossing full of people sounds expensive, especially on an iPhone. The trick is that the game never draws hundreds of people at once. Each pedestrian gets their own speed and their own moment to cross, new ones spawn only when the crowd needs them, and anyone who walks past the bottom edge is removed. The crossing always looks packed, but only the people on screen exist.
- Spawn above the screen, only when the crowd needs more people.
- Cross each at their own speed and their own moment.
- Removed as soon as they pass the bottom line.
Tuning the difficulty
Each wave starts the crowd a little bigger than the last. I tuned the difficulty mostly around each wave's score target and the abilities the player had picked up by then.
Playtesting turned up a different problem: a lot of players were frustrated by the target prompt, the list of traits to match. It was a sentence to read ("Brown Shirt, White Hat, with White Bag") while the crowd kept moving. We redesigned it as four slots, hair, shirt, pants, and bag, that you can take in at a glance.
What I'd change
The idea is for everything to point your attention back at the crowd: clothing colours are the puzzle, the moving pedestrians are the pressure. We didn't get all the way there. If I made it again, I'd work on cohesion and the core loop first, because those are where it fell short.