Cloud Atlas in 60 Seconds by The4thCircle

[raw]
made by The4thCircle for LD27 (COMPO)
Cloud Atlas is a three hour movie spanning 6 people's lives.

What if they had each had lived for only 10 seconds!?

It's a one button Android touch screen game, every second you will be placed in the shoes of one of the characters and given an action. Tap the screen to take that action. If you act wrongly, or fail to act when appropriate, you will be told why it was wrong and get a chance to start again.

This game is brutally difficult, even for hardcore fans of the movie, and I think it is a good parody of movie based games, which boil the plot down to simple points and clumsily hang a game mechanic on it.

I consider it to be the only thing I will ever create that has value.

Feedback

馃帳 The4thCircle
25. Aug 2013 路 22:16 UTC
Should be mentioned that I forgot half of the names of the characters so bigger fans of the film... just.. go easy on me okay, you can work out who's who.
urth
26. Aug 2013 路 14:48 UTC
I intalled it on an Android Emulator but when I start it I get:
Unfortunately, CloudAtlas has stopped.
馃帳 The4thCircle
26. Aug 2013 路 15:05 UTC
Emulator won't cut it, this is a native app so it needs actual hardware.
timtipgames
26. Aug 2013 路 19:43 UTC
I don't remember the characters very well, but game wise the text is gone before I have even read it. I had to go through the sequence several times to read them. Sure you can learn the correct sequence, and I get that could also be seen as part of the parody. But it kind of took the fun out of it for me. Nexus 4.
馃帳 The4thCircle
26. Aug 2013 路 22:53 UTC
This is kind of against the rules but on my website I made an easier version called cloud atlas in 5 minutes. Off theme but you have a fighting chance with it... The4thcircle.co.uk/games.html
urth
27. Aug 2013 路 02:21 UTC
Installed it on my Galaxy S3.
I have seen the movie but I never thought a game related to that movie would be like that. The concept seems unrelated to the theme.
KevinWorkman
28. Aug 2013 路 00:27 UTC
I was really intrigued by what I could see, but the text was waaay too fast for me to read. Plus I never saw the movie, so I have no idea what's going on. I like the style though, would like to play more like this in the future!
Jimanzium
28. Aug 2013 路 09:59 UTC
Shame about the android requirement
madk
29. Aug 2013 路 03:41 UTC
Dammit, man, read the book! It is SO MUCH better than the movie.
Arrow-x
01. Sep 2013 路 18:09 UTC
I am too dum for this game T.T
garygreen
01. Sep 2013 路 22:35 UTC
I liked the idea behind this, but it was way too fast for me to even read what was on the screen.
matthias_zarzecki
05. Sep 2013 路 06:01 UTC
Hope people will find this!
voidstar69
09. Sep 2013 路 06:27 UTC
An interesting concept. The text was too quick for me to read - it was displayed for about 1 or 1.5 seconds. But after many attempts (50?) I eventually read the text in each situation. I got about 15 situations in before I got bored trying to remember the pattern of situations to act in versus those to leave alone. I think I could only 'win' this game by writing the pattern down on paper, i.e. cheating!
Well done for coming up with a brand new type of game.
mcc
12. Sep 2013 路 04:24 UTC
Borrowed an Android phone, tried this out. This was鈥β爓ell, hilarious, for starters, when I got what was going on I *really* liked the concept, and I was literally laughing out loud most of the time I was trying to play. Unfortunately I found this too difficult to actually play. The problem, basically, is there is not enough time to actually read any of the text. So what the game actually becomes is a repeated trial and error of memorizing a long "touch, touch, touch, don't, touch, don't, don't, touch" string (I met with *some* success using mental RLE). Which is鈥β爄nteresting in that it's sorta unique, but doesn't really exercise an interesting skill, and is *really* too bad because it eclipses what really is a very cool intended premise (make a series of very quick do-or-don't decisions, then replay until you have the correct set of decisions down) and some rather funny text. (If you're just playing the game as "find and remember this long binary sequence", this *requires* you to not so much as look at the text in the later levels, or even read the failure messages between play attempts, because too much of your brain is tasked concentrating on remembering the string and not breaking that concentration).

I think this could be a lot more playable, and its potential more met, if

- It were like, "Cloud Atlas in Two Minutes" or "Cloud Atlas in Three Minutes" and each individual segment were 2x-3x as long. I don't think you lose much by decreasing the difficulty because difficulty stays in by the sheer length of the thing and the one-hit-loss nature.

- Sound, really, would help me ground a *lot* in understanding what's happening and staying focused. Even really simple sound, like a bang or a bell on scene changes or a buzzer on failure.

- If there were more feedback given as to *how long you have left*. In the absence of such the time to act per scene might as well be zero. (The fact there's no feedback *did* induce a kind of cool sense of trapped panic which was extremely compatible with Cloud Atlas's actual plot, but it drowns out other things about the game that are more interesting.)

- 鈥 see why you made this a mobile game, but without ease on the difficulty I think I would have found it easier to play this on a computer.

Good show tho :D

Anyway at some point in the next two years my wife is going to be going through the files on her phone, find "CloudAtlas" and go wtf is this
mcc
12. Sep 2013 路 04:25 UTC
LUDUM DARE HAET UTF-8