Count Dawn 🧛🌅

Count Dawn 🧛🌅

GMTK Game Jam submission — theme: "Countdown". A reverse horde survival game: you are the monster. Hunt the humans who came to kill you, drink enough of them to matter, put down whatever they sent to lead the mob, and be back in your coffin before the sun finishes rising.

Play Count Dawn | Itch.io | Source

Count Dawn runs in the browser with no account or install, on desktop and on mobile. The countdown to dawn is always ticking and always on screen.

The Night

The castle great hall is the main menu. Press START and the coffin opens; the Count spirals out of it as a bat and lands in the middle of the floor.

Each night runs on one clock:

1. Hunters enter only through the side and lower walls, then come straight at you. The window wall is never a spawn route.
2. Kill them. Every corpse scatters bloodlets that fly to your Blood Meter.
3. Filling the meter summons that night's boss lineup at the far edge of the hall.
4. When the meter is full and every boss is dead, the coffin lights up.
5. Get inside before the timer hits zero.

Surviving does not end the run. The lid shuts, your blood drains into your health bar, the sun crosses the sky and sets, a new moon rises, and the Count flies back out for a harder night. Dawn or death are the only ways a run actually ends — and both show a full debrief of everything you did across every night.

Wrath & the Ultimate

Blood you have no use for does not go to waste. Once your health is already full, every drop of overflow instead fills a third meter — Wrath — sitting between your health and blood bars. Mini-bosses are the main way it climbs: a Captain or the Priest floods the floor with far more blood than any regular hunter drops, and since a boss never even spawns until the blood meter is already full, every one of those drops is guaranteed overflow. Overnight healing works the same way: it spends that night's whole blood pool on real 1-blood-per-HP healing first — so a bad night's damage might not fully recover — and only spills whatever is left over into Wrath.

A full meter glows gold, circled by dark motes, and is ready to spend on the Ultimate: the Count rears up and unleashes a bolt of lightning that spreads across the whole hall and kills everything still standing in it — mini-bosses included — while a swarm of bats bursts out of dark magic and swirls the room and the hall dims for a few seconds.

What Hunts You

A weapon buys reach and cadence, never damage — every regular hit costs 5 HP whatever swung it. Captains and the Priest hit for 10.

Boss telegraphs

Bosses cannot be staggered out of a special. Hitting one mid-attack shoves it and nothing more, so every boss warns you first: a ring closes and brightens on its body — gold for the Priest's ward, red for a Captain's swing, green for a garlic volley. The answer is footwork, not damage.

The Priest's ward is the clearest case. The full circle is painted gold on the floor for most of a second before anything burns, then the light sweeps out as staggered rings while a giant golden cross rises out of the circle trailing sparks. Walk out while it is being drawn, or dash through the edge in bat form — the dash's invulnerability carries you clean.

Controls

Every strike is one press, one hit — clicking, tapping the ⚔ button or tapping the playfield all land a single swing each time, with no holding a button down for a stream of free hits.

The Count faces the cursor — he is aiming, not steering, so you can back away from a crowd while still facing it.

The bat dash is a short invulnerable burst with after-images and a HUD charge strip. It is how you break out of a crowd, how you dodge a garlic lock, and how you cross a Priest's ward.

Mobile requires landscape; a rotate prompt appears in portrait. Gameplay and SFX pause behind it while the current soundtrack continues quietly at the same 20% level used by the pause menu.

Player-Facing Features

• Wordless cold open that teaches the loop: the Count comes home nearly dead through the middle window, the whole cast of what hunts him closes in from the sides and below, and he answers with the Ultimate itself — layered lightning, chain bolts, screen flashes, shake, particles and a bat swarm wiping the ring in one demonstrated cast — before drinking his fill and sleeping off a day. It can be paused, or skipped with a deliberate two-second hold.
• Lightning title gag on the menu — the cover rests on COUNT DAWN, a storm flash stutters it onto COUNT DOWN, and another knocks it back.
• Seamless night cycle with no screen in between: coffin, blood-to-health transfer, sunrise, a full day, and the next night's moon rising over the hall.
• Living sky behind the windows — night gradient, twinkling stars, a sun that rises into the middle window and fully sets into the right one, and a moon that carries a real lunar phase per night.
• Sunrise countdown framed in the centre window, with tick pops, a growing tremble, and a red panic mode with vignette and camera shake in the final ten seconds. The final five beats briefly double the timer, while 2 and 1 add half-second flashes.
• Bat form for the dash and both coffin flights, with a poof of smoke on every transformation.
• Mouse-aimed melee arc with a cooldown pip, hit flash, knockback and a magic burst on every landed strike.
• Blood overflow past the night's quota heals the Count instead of being thrown away — and once health is already full too, feeds the Wrath meter toward an Ultimate instead.
• Ultimate: hall-wide lightning that kills every enemy standing (mini-bosses included), a swarm of ~30 bats out of dark magic, and a few seconds of the hall dimming.
• Mini-bosses flood the floor with far more blood than a regular hunter on death, and a burst of several kills in quick succession — or any mini-boss — splatters big, semi-transparent blood across the screen itself.
• End-of-run debrief on any death: nights survived, total blood drained across the whole run, and full breakdowns of hunters drained and mini-bosses slain — each line with the thing it counts animated beside it.
• Pause overlay with General and Sound settings, fullscreen button, rotate-to-landscape gate, and device-aware menus and hint text. Pausing freezes active SFX and keeps the soundtrack in the background at 20% of the configured level.
• General settings include a whole-canvas red-friendly palette. Desktop also gets 50–200% cursor size and 25–200% cursor speed controls; cursor settings are not constructed on touch devices. Sound settings include Master, Music and SFX levels, independent channel mutes and reset controls.
• Mobile controls that visibly respond: every button flashes and pops on press, and the compact gothic joystick pulses gently until it is grabbed. Its invisible finger target is larger than the art without swallowing ordinary playfield attack taps.
• In-game audio balance editor (see below) for tuning every track and effect live.

Audio Balance Editor

Append ?audioEditor=1 to the URL and press F8. A panel lists every music track and sound effect with a live volume slider, a master mute, preview controls, and a button that dumps the current values as a code block ready to paste into src/data/audioBalance.ts. The OS mouse pointer is restored only while this editor is open so the sliders can be dragged. Editor previews intentionally bypass pause-menu SFX suppression and music ducking.

Full details in docs/AUDIO.md.

Tech Stack

• Phaser 4 — rendering, Arcade physics, animation, tweens, audio.
• TypeScript (strict) and Vite for the build.
• ESLint and node:test for the pure game-rule tests.
• Python + Pillow for the offline sprite-sheet pipeline (tools/), not part of the runtime.
• Fully static output — no backend, no accounts, no network calls.

Local Development

npm install
npm run dev

Open the printed localhost URL.

Set FAST_DEV_MODE = true in src/data/balance.ts for a 25-second night — every balance number the game uses lives in that one file.

Development tools

• Audio Balance Editor: use ?audioEditor=1, then F8, to preview and tune every manifest audio asset. Copy Configuration produces values ready for src/data/audioBalance.ts; full operation and browser-storage details are in docs/AUDIO.md.
• Fast nights: FAST_DEV_MODE reduces the round clock to 25 seconds for loop, dawn and urgency testing.
• Browser inspection: development builds expose the Phaser instance as window.game; production builds do not.
• QA sweep: docs/QA_CHECKLIST.md covers desktop, mobile, menus, cutscenes, audio, deaths and multi-night regressions.
• Sprite pipeline: the scripts under tools/ rebuild shipped sheets from committed source art. They are offline build tools and never ship to players.

Rebuilding the sprite sheets

Romi's original drawings ship under public/assets/RAW/ so no sheet is ever orphaned from its source. The builders take their source folder as the only argument and are idempotent; the final no-argument helper cleans partial-alpha dither from the castle windows:

python tools/build_count_sheets.py public/assets/RAW/count
python tools/build_hunter_sheets.py public/assets/RAW
python tools/build_priest_sheet.py public/assets/RAW/priest
python tools/build_weapon_props.py public/assets/RAW/weapons
python tools/build_green_props.py public/assets/RAW
python tools/build_bat_sheet.py public/assets/RAW/bat
python tools/clean_window_dither.py

How the keying works and why each script does it differently is in docs/ASSET_INTEGRATION.md.

Repository Map

src/
  game/      bootstrap: main, Phaser config, constants, event names, cursor, fullscreen
  scenes/    Boot, Preload, Game (also the menu), Pause, GameOver, Victory
  entities/  Player, Hunter, ArmedHunter, GarlicThrower, HunterCaptain,
             GarlicCaptain, Priest, BossCharge, Garlic, BloodPickup, Coffin
  systems/   Input, Combat, Spawn, entrance/navigation, Countdown, GameFlow,
             AudioDirector, coldOpen
  ui/        HUD + urgency rules, BossHealthBar, TouchControls, MenuLightning,
             RunDebrief, AudioEditor
  data/      balance.ts — tunable game numbers; gameSettings; audio manifest/balance
  utils/     assetKeys, animations, direction, runtime placeholder textures
  types/     shared game types
public/assets/  shipped art and audio; RAW/ holds the source drawings
tools/     offline Python sprite-sheet builders
tests/     node:test unit tests for the pure rules
docs/      game loop, asset integration, audio, deployment

Deployment

Every push to any branch triggers a Vercel build; main deploys to Production and everything else gets a Preview. npm run build produces the static dist/ that also works for itch.io — see docs/DEPLOYMENT.md.

Flow: feature branches → staging → main.

Current Codebase Coverage

Shipped and implemented:

• Endless night loop with per-night scaling of blood quota, spawn rate, alive cap, thrower cap and boss lineup.
• Five hunter flavours, three boss flavours, boss telegraphs and uninterruptible boss specials.
• Wrath meter and Ultimate: hall-wide lightning kill, a bat swarm, and a screen darken, charged by blood the Count has no use for.
• Hand-drawn Count with idle/run/attack and two distinct death sequences, plus bat form.
• Cold open, seamless between-night cycle, victory outro, and both defeat endings with a full run debrief.
• Desktop and touch control paths, landscape gate, fullscreen, pauseable cinematics and hold-to-skip intro controls.
• Persistent, compact player settings for accessibility, cursor and audio; default General values remove their browser-storage entry instead of leaving unnecessary data behind.
• Original music and SFX with an OGG/MP3 pair per key, a music state machine, menu ducking/SFX suspension, and a live balance editor.
• Offline sprite pipeline with all source art committed alongside the built sheets.

Pending:

• The blood droplet is still a runtime-generated placeholder rather than drawn art.
• Several SFX keys are wired at every hook point but have no file yet (player hurt, hunter death, boss appearance, final seconds, dawn, victory, defeat) — they are silent no-ops until a file is added to the manifest.
• Summonable bat minions that pull hunter aggro: the sprite and animation ship, the summon does not.
• Boss phases — intentionally out of scope.

Credits

Dotan Veretzky — design, programming, game architecture.

Romi Elbom — all original art: the Count, every hunter who walks into the hall (pilgrim, huntress, garlic farmer, Priest), the four hunter weapons (wooden spike, pitchfork, burning torch, gold cross), the blood, the bat, the coffin, the garlic, and the cover art in all its title variants.

Noam Ouzana — original soundtrack and sound design: the Main Title theme and the Level Music that plays through every night, plus the WOOSH of the Count's swing and the SLURP of him drinking. soundcloud.com/ouzana

Abed Kadry — design and playtesting.

Third-party assets

Character and environment art from CraftPix under the CraftPix file license (free packs, game use permitted):

• Free Vampire 4-Direction Pixel Character Sprite Pack — the effects-only magic layer, all that remains in use now that the Count is Romi's. It is the burst on a landed strike and the spell he throws as he swings. craftpix.net
• Free 2D Top-Down Pixel Dungeon Asset Pack — castle tiles and torch flames. craftpix.net

Every human in the hall is Romi's now — the pilgrim, the huntress, the garlic farmer and the Priest — so the CraftPix character pack that used to dress them is no longer used at all. Only its effects-only magic layer and the dungeon tileset remain.

No AI-generated art or audio is used anywhere in this project.

More Docs

• Game loop — rules, boss lineups, the ward, endings.
• Asset integration — the sprite pipeline and how the chroma keys work.
• Audio — encoding workflow, the music state flow, the balance editor.
• Deployment — Vercel, static hosts, itch.io packaging.