Before Night Falls by WetDesertRock

[raw]
made by WetDesertRock for LD28 (JAM)
You only have one day to complete each puzzle. However, you may replay the day with the echoes of the past helping you complete the puzzle.

This game could've been submitted to the compo, however more time was needed to create more levels. It is written in python with pygame.

Thanks goes out to Sim for creating a windows .exe for it. Thanks goes out to rxi for helping me make linux users like me (he helped package it).

To run you need pygame and at least python 2.6 (uses the standard json library).

And yes, Corridor Digital's Clock Blockers was used as inspiration: http://youtu.be/CBawCe6du3w

Ratings

Coolness 74% 3
Overall(Jam) 3.03 305
Audio(Jam) 2.22 407
Fun(Jam) 3.11 184
Graphics(Jam) 2.03 510
Humor(Jam) 2.05 349
Innovation(Jam) 3.24 144
Mood(Jam) 2.61 371
Theme(Jam) 2.60 329

Feedback

Unept
17. Dec 2013 · 05:00 UTC
Hey, great puzzle mechanic! It'd be interesting to flesh it out a bit more. Well done!
kidder
17. Dec 2013 · 05:30 UTC
Slightly broken on a retina mac - only takes up a quarter of the window. Difficult to get past the title screen because the button positions don't match the hitboxes.

Besides that - cool idea. The puzzle advancement is a bit slow at first, but there are some interesting things going on once you get past the few few levels.
johnfn
17. Dec 2013 · 05:32 UTC
Nice job! That puzzle mechanic was realllllly clever. Though the progression of levels was a tad slow. Still I would love to see that mechanic be developed more.
cdgugler
17. Dec 2013 · 05:41 UTC
Cool idea! It took me a minute to wrap my head around the concept of echoes, but pretty easy once it clicked.
Ekilibr
17. Dec 2013 · 08:21 UTC
As the others said, great mechanics ! Pretty cool game, good job !
cappelnord
17. Dec 2013 · 14:44 UTC
Nice puzzle game, could have a better presentation though.
blasmena
17. Dec 2013 · 20:39 UTC
At first I thought it would be easy the whole time, but I found myself in trouble in the later levels, nice!
robhor
18. Dec 2013 · 00:18 UTC
Good game!
Liked the echoes mechanic.
The first few puzzles after introducing the echoes were basically all solvable using the same basic technique.
The last lever however required a bit more thinking :)
🎤 WetDesertRock
18. Dec 2013 · 00:38 UTC
Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I discussed at a little more in my postmortem, but I found that my playtesters were not understanding of the game mechanics after the first part of the tutorial. So after discussing with them I had a list of changes I needed to make. Most were interface changes, but I also thought more tutorial levels would help them learn. Seems like its not the same. Sorry for the ratio of tutorials to real levels.
arcticleaf
18. Dec 2013 · 00:55 UTC
niceeee
Venks
18. Dec 2013 · 03:02 UTC
very interesting game. I'm pretty partial to puzzle games so this was a great play for me. I was a little confused at first, but nothing a little trial-and-error can't solve.
udinjelek
18. Dec 2013 · 04:22 UTC
great puzzle :D since I love puzzle I enjoy to play it.
🎤 WetDesertRock
18. Dec 2013 · 05:04 UTC
If you have a retina display mac, try doing what this answer on stack overflow says: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17257977

Besides that, I'm sorry, I cannot help too much. The only issue preventing you from playing it is on the main menu. If you can figure out the mouse offset to hit the play button, you will be able to play the rest of the game easily with just your arrow keys.
Gerjj
19. Dec 2013 · 00:56 UTC
Love the puzzle element! It has potential!
ParaPup
19. Dec 2013 · 23:46 UTC
Not bad It was fun and a great game.
tobbez
20. Dec 2013 · 12:28 UTC
Really like the idea, at first the solutions were pretty obvoius but then it got a bit harder. Could be really good if you make some more levels.
f7f5
20. Dec 2013 · 20:24 UTC
It was fun playing your game. Only the later levels posed some challenge, but still good work on the level design for a first try.
For a Jam entry it, could have used some better graphics/audio.
Sim
21. Dec 2013 · 16:43 UTC
Fun little game. I've seen this idea a few times before but not exactly the same. My only complaint is a lot of the levels have straight-forward solutions - if there were more ways to interfere with your clones (e.g. changing their path by blocking it) then it'd make the levels more interesting.
🎤 WetDesertRock
22. Dec 2013 · 05:50 UTC
A fair amount of you are commenting about the levels. Just for an explanation: I'm sorry they are slow, but I figured it was more of a crime to make it too hard and not introduce people to the game than it was to make it slower to start. Unfortunately, in making easy levels I cut out the amount of harder levels I was able to make in the timeframe. I do plan on adding in more levels and fleshing it out.
Benjamin
23. Dec 2013 · 23:35 UTC
the problem about the level is not that they are easy it's just that some of them are the same with a different shape. When you just solved a problem you want to see a brand new one, that's why the game seems slow.

Apart of that the game is great. I like the mechanic and also the word "echo". I wish you had time to implement some motion-tweening to see all my echoes moving around :)
TeamFlare
28. Dec 2013 · 15:03 UTC
I liked the idea of this game. Had a lot of fun playing it, good job!
george_prosser
30. Dec 2013 · 00:05 UTC
Very cool, reminds of the game 'cursor x10'
Jupiter_Hadley
04. Jan 2014 · 02:45 UTC
This game was pretty cool!! Sadly, it would not record with fraps so I couldnt include it in my Ludum dare 28 compilation video series... :/
bvanschooten
04. Jan 2014 · 14:15 UTC
Nice puzzle game! It took me a couple of minutes to grasp the echoes concept, after that it was fun. The first levels are a bit too easy.