Life Loops by deathray

made by deathray for MINI39 (-)

A simple game of life choices and time travel.

"Life can be random and unfair. With the power of hindsight, you learn which path in life is best.
Try to survive until time travel is invented, and you will have the chance to go back and give guidance to your past self."

Help:
- Try to get the highest score possible.
- Each decision point has only 1 positive outcome and 2 negative outcomes.
- At first your decisions will likely be random, but once you can time travel you can learn from your mistakes.
- It may take a few tries before you survive long enough to see the invention of time travel (just start over and try again).

I made this mostly from scratch, only pulling in a few functions from my previous LD entry (Diabolical Genius). Game concept very vaguely inspired from the movie Looper. Character style inspired by Nimblebit.

Tools used: Notepadd++, Chrome, ASEPRITE, Photoshop.
Sounds from freesound.org.

Keywords: HTML, HTML5, mobile, phone, web, javascript

Web (miniLD version)	http://deathraygames.com/play-online/miniLD39/index.html
Original URL	https://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-39/?action=preview&uid=17861

Ratings

Coolness	90%	2
Overall	2.86	9

Audio	1.83	8
Fun	2.43	8
Graphics	2.71	8
Humor	2.00	6
Innovation	3.43	4
Mood	2.40	10
Theme	3.71	2

Feedback

trigger_hurt

22. Jan 2013 · 23:18 UTC

My biggest complaint about this game is that it takes too many clicks to time travel. At first, I thought you had always needed to click the button at the bottom, but even after I had to close that annoying pop-up notification every few seconds.

🎤 deathray

24. Jan 2013 · 07:22 UTC

trigger_hurt -- Try it again if you have the time. I just made a few changes:
+ easier to travel back (no annoying alert messages)
+ progress meter for time travel tech
+ sounds
+ faster aging for more challenge
+ menu option
+ timeline scrolling should now work on mobile devices (only tested on Android and iPad)

Jacic

24. Jan 2013 · 18:51 UTC

It can be difficult at first, but I found this rather fun.

My only real complain is that there isn't much reason to play again after doing somewhat well. Maybe you could have children, then control them?

EdoMiyamoto

24. Jan 2013 · 21:36 UTC

It's a good concept !

🎤 deathray

25. Jan 2013 · 07:50 UTC

Thanks Janic and Edo. Janic - you're right that there's no replay value at the moment. I like the idea of offspring but not sure how to make that work. Any ideas? I may add multiple difficulties for a post-compo version so it can be replayed.

Spelchan

29. Jan 2013 · 04:53 UTC

Interesting use of time travel. The problem is that once you have time travel it is easy to make gains by time traveling every time you make a mistake.

scriptorum

29. Jan 2013 · 07:27 UTC

I like the idea of the game. Spelchan is right that if you time travel just one step back after every mistake you can't lose. I think I'd like it if the individual circles didn't all just disappear when you went back, but rather gray out showing what type of event it was. So correcting a mistake might involve moving above or below a section in order to hit a different green (for example) than the one you hit before, ultimately resynching with your prior timeline if it was a good streak. Also to make good streaks more likely, perhaps make one of the bad results into a neutral?

🎤 deathray

31. Jan 2013 · 07:02 UTC

To Spelchan's point -- For better or worse, that is how you play the game. I figured there was some challenge because there's only a window of time between time travel being invented and your character's old age (where you incur penalties) ...but maybe there's a need to re-balance things somehow.

Scriptorum -- I like your idea!

scriptorum

31. Jan 2013 · 20:19 UTC

I keep thinking it'd be cool if you had randomly generated event descriptions. "Got laid off." "Fired for drug usage." "Dead aunt left me money." That could be especially cool if you created category-crossing events, like "Drove car into building, but met a nice nurse.": -wealth -health +social. But that could get complicated. :)

🎤 deathray

04. Feb 2013 · 15:20 UTC

^ that's exactly the next thing on my post-compo-To-Do list! :)