Construct the ideal delivery route to reach all houses in under ten seconds by weaving backwards and forwards in time in the puzzler Renew my Subscription by Cassowary for the 'every 10 seconds' themed Ludum Dare 51 game jam.
Hi! I'm Bart Bonte, a Belgian independent game designer and bontegames.com is where I blog about new interesting browser and mobile games. My own games are all in the left column (or at the bottom of this page on mobile). More info about me and my games on bartbonte.com.
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14 comments:
Not a fan.
I couldn't get it to work. Every time I tried to return home, it said "Time Paradox."
Took me a while to get my head around it. Then I finally nailed it. To avoid colliding with your other selves, you need to get out of their way either spatially or temporally. For instance, drive up one road in the lower seconds (1-4), then later return down that same road in the upper seconds (6-10) to avoid colliding with your past self. In some levels where you pass the same crossing several times, it takes some careful planning to pass that crossing in a different second (of each second 1-10) each time.
doesnt work for me. I can go up and down once and then it stops, no next level loads. If I press space then the colors go funky and thats it
While the Ludum Dare event often produces some interesting finalists, I'd like to point out two things:
1. Even the winners are often buggy. Presenting them here, in a context where top-notch work also appears, might be unfair to them. It isn't reasonable to assume they will hold up by comparison to the same standard the other games meet.
2. All jams, intentionally or not, mimic "crunch time." The gaming industry doesn't always treat its workers vary well. Anything that suggests losing sleep and working excessive hours to make a game is some kind of "normal" might be bad for the profession.
Just my US$0.02.
both excellent points
Thanks everyone for playing the game. Apologies if it was not your cup of tea. This game is certainly not for everyone, and I was kind of surprised to see it did as well as it did / to see it posted around to places like this. Also, it was indeed made in only a weekend, so I hope that gives some context.
The concept of the game can be a little difficult to wrap your brain around, but it does obey a consistent and fairly simple set of rules, even if the consequences of those rules are difficult to comprehend at times. It does suffer a bit from the fact you can kind of brute-force your way through the early levels without internalizing the logic.
The "can't pass level 1" bug has been reported a few times but I've so far been unable to reproduce it myself -- one person, even, when I asked them to check for an error message, said the game worked for them when they tried playing it again, so it's a rather elusive bug to track down. (At the risk of misattributing the cause: are you sure you've returned all the way back to the beginning with the green square? You won't be able to move once the timer reaches ten seconds, but this is intentional.) Is there an error shown in the developer console? (F12)
Regarding getting an unexpected time paradox, this happens when you occupy the same position at the same point in time as your past self. There are a few scenarios I can foresee as being confusing:
1. If you press space and immediately move in the opposite direction you were moving before you pressed it, this will create a time paradox. (With time moving backwards, consider the path your past self will trace out behind you...)
2. If you're getting a time paradox with a flashing "✳" sort of symbol while trying to just move around (eg on level 5), that means one of your past selves appeared out of nowhere on that space right as you moved into it (due to you having reversed time at that exact point before). This isn't a bug, but it is something the game doesn't communicate very well; I experimented with an "onion skin" type interface during the jam to show where objects would be one second in the future, but it kind of just made things look more confusing. So, sorry about that. It isn't the greatest it could be. Though, this problem might not have a perfect solution.
3. If you try to return back to the start while one of your past selves is currently at the start, you will also cause a time paradox. You need to figure out how to get back to the start while the starting space is unoccupied.
4. If you wait, press space bar, then wait again, you'll get a time paradox for the same reason as #1.
5. If you get a time paradox on level 11 *after* returning to the start, you are encouraged to think through why this may occur ;)
6. If you're getting a time paradox without having pressed space bar, or when moving into a space you've never visited before, that would actually be a bug I haven't seen reported before... If you don't mind, I'd love to know how to reproduce it.
Again, my apologies if you didn't enjoy the game. I definitely think this one's appeal is pretty niche, and it's possible it may not really be enjoyable for people who are not four-dimensional space aliens, but ultimately not everything is for everyone and that's ok. I hope some people (or space aliens) were able to get some enjoyment from it, at least. :)
For what it's worth, by the end I thoroughly enjoyed the game and took satisfaction in mapping out my approach. Thank you, cassowary!
Maybe I am also a 4d space alien, but I enjoyed the game too :-) I liked having a time-travel mechanic that was not the good old "time jump".
The following may or may not make the game accessible to some players:
1. Instead of using a keystroke "z" to go in reverse time, using a key modifier "shift" (so for example shift-up will go up in space while going backwards in time).
2. Making the cars always point "forward in time", so in a backwards-in-time move the car looks like it is going in reverse, and in the replay all concurrent cars appear going forward.
Hi cassowary,
I'm the guy who complained about the first level issue. I think it must be browser related. I couldn't play in chrome on my work laptop (perhaps an IT issue of my office?), regardless of refreshes but could on my PC on firefox.
However, using the "." button didn't work for me consistently there. Perhaps due to my european keyboard, but even after i remapped my keyboard to a US keyboard, it only worked a few times before failing to respond. I didn't finish it because of this, but I still enjoyed it.
Thank you!
Yeah, I think it seems to be a Chrome-specific error, but it does work for me in Chrome as well... Maybe it's a specific version of Chrome? I'll try and track this down.
I know '.' on some European keyboards is weird so I think I should add an alternate key for that too. But it is intentional that you cannot press '.' on a one-way street (though this is explained on level 6 and I've seen people be confused on level 5 when the one-way mechanic is introduced, oops. Again... perils of making a game in a weekend, haha)
Thanks for responding!
I was getting the "freeze at start" bug, but I enabled cookies and that fixed it.
It appears that Chrome automatically blocks the cookies from "https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/" so that might be what's causing the issue.
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