A GMTK Game Jam 2026 entry — Theme: "Count Down"

The pitch

You run an industrial sorting line. Grab parts with the robotic arm, drop them in the right container, don't screw it up. Simple.

But you're on a 90-second... no, 180-second clock, and every 20 seconds the factory reserves the right to break its own rules. The lights flicker, an alarm sounds, and suddenly your controls are inverted — or gravity lets go and you're yanked into a drone to chase floating parts through the air — or the whole world slams into overdrive and parts come twice as fast.

You never know which shift is coming. You just know the countdown never stops.

How it fits the theme

The countdown isn't just a timer on the screen — it's the engine that drives the chaos. Every tick of the clock brings the next mutator closer. The final ten seconds tick out loud, faster and sharper, while you scramble to bank one last part before the line freezes for good. Counting down is the game.

Controls

Robotic Arm

• Q / E — select active joint
• A / D — rotate base (left / right, 360°)
• W / S — rotate joint (up / down)
• Z / X — roll forearm (360° twist)
• Mouse — look
  
• Space — grab / release part
• F — switch to the drone

Inspection Drone (you'll be forced into it during Anti-Gravity)

• W A S D — move
• Space / Shift — up / down
• Mouse — look
  
• E — grab / release part
• F — switch back to the arm

Objective - How to play

Score as high as you can before clock hits zero. Parts ride in on conveyors, colour-coded:

• 🟢 Green = good part → drop it in a container at the end of the lines.
• 🔴 Red = defective part → drop it in the reject container behind the arm.

Sort correctly for +100 (+200 while a mutator is active). Wrong container costs you -50.

The three shifts

Every 20 seconds, one of these fires for 20 seconds — or, sometimes, nothing happens and you get a moment of calm. You won't know which until it hits.

• ⟲ SCRAMBLE — the arm's controls invert. Muscle memory becomes your enemy.
• ▲ ANTI-GRAVITY — parts lift off the line and float above their crates. You're thrown out of the arm and into the drone, which snaps parts to a pulsing magnetic grabber and carries them so you can fly each one to the right container yourself.
• ⏩ OVERDRIVE — time dilation spikes and the factory doubles its output. Everything, faster.

Survive the shift and the score bonus is worth the risk.

Credits

All external assets are used under their respective licenses. No generative AI was used for any art or audio in this game.

Audio

• Servo / ambience — "Machine Rooms" by yellaUmbrella Music (Fab, Standard License)
• Drone rotor — "Drone Flying" by Sheyvan (Freesound, CC0)
• Grab click — "Lock click in steel door" by Zabuhailo (Freesound, CC-BY 4.0)
• Conveyor belt — "Conveyor belt" by freemaster2 (Freesound, CC-BY 4.0)
• Correct chime — "Triple Ping Notification" by PiesHelpfulOven (Freesound, CC0)
• Error buzzer — "Access denied buzz" by Jacco18 (Freesound, CC0)
• Mutator stings / countdown ticks — "Glitch Noises" by Vladislav Zharkov (Fab, Standard License)
• Music — "Fun House Music (Electronic - EDM)" by juanjo_sound (Fab, Standard License)

3D Art

• Robotic arm, inspection drone, assembly lines & conveyors, factory props — "Factory Environment Collection" by ArtCore Studios, in collaboration with Epic Games (free on Fab). The robotic arm mesh was split into individually articulated joints in Blender for this project.
• Warehouse environment — Quixel Megascans (Epic Games)
• Rusty Wheel (sorted part) — Quixel Megascans (Epic Games), free on Fab
• Sci-fi Industrial Container Game 03 — CGGame (Fab)
• The Sphere — Treehouseassets (Fab, free)

Engine & code — Unreal Engine 5.7. All gameplay systems (chaos director, mutators, scoring, countdown, forced possession, part levitation, drone flight and collision) written in C++ by Adam Iannis (Cupcake666).

Notes

Built solo for the GMTK Game Jam 2026. The foundation of this game is built on top of a physically accurate UE5 industrial simulator I previously developed as an academic project. The entire arcade transformation — the chaos director, mutator logic, scoring, countdown, forced possession, levitation physics, and all audio hookups — was conceptualized and coded strictly within the game jam timeframe.