Ouroboros Paradox by TolMera
Ouroboros Paradox
Pre action report:
Officer 418
Preliminary assessment is showing a paradox loop exists on March 12 - 14, 2020
The source of the loop is a train, travelling from Chicago Union Station (March 12th)
The source of the loop is unknown, but the effect is that the train has attached back onto itself, creating an infinite corridor. While the train is stuck in this loop only between the 12th and the 14th, conditions inside the train may be unstable, and time is most likely also looped back on itself.
Deployment to the train will be a precision operation, and equipment will need to be sent separately, entry conditions are too small to allow a full deployment.
I will be the first to deploy to the train, and will assess the situation, if possible I will resolve it. Otherwise I may be stuck there for some time until additional resources arrive from the outside.
All arrangements are in place, and the deployment team will send me down as soon as I feel I have adequately prepared.
Controls
Controls are the normal WASD - apologies for those on non-US keyboards, we wanted to make these mappable, but didn't have the time during the Jam.
Left mouse to shoot
Space to jump
Mouse move to look around
F to speak to NPC
E to interact (limited interactions)
Story (SPOILERS)
you are officer 418 Your job (You don't have a choice about accepting it) is to break a train full of civilians out of the Ouroboros Paradox, or in simpler terms, the snake eating it's own tail.
Speak to the NPC to gain insight into the situation on the train. Make your way to the head of the train, and if you can survive you should be able to find a way to rescue the civilians and break the loop.
SPOILER
Talk to the NPCs Fight your way to the engine room Fight the Boss Decouple the train from itself (one ending) Go through the doorway and repeat the process until you have rescued all the civilians who are on the train, and you have beaten the Boss several times (Pesky guy) Eventually destroy the engine (not implemented - this is the alternate ending, and the only ending in which you actually manage to save everyone, and break the loop for real).
We hope you enjoy our jam game
Built by our team of three Musicians, four Artists, three Developers and one Support role. From spamming the LD site with adverts for a team, we managed to pull together an awesome group of people who have never worked together before, and we knocked out an awesome game.
Music by:
Fadi Khoury
ldjam: @fadi-khoury
Website: https://www.fadikhourymusic.com/home
Sound Design by:
James Mello
Sound Design & Music - I love to collaborate and bring games to life through sound and music!
Twitter: @spidertears
Instagram: jamesrmello
ldjam: @james-audio
Website & Full Portfolio: https://www.jamesrmello.com/
Christian Camargo
Instagram Profile: @cncsounddesigner
ldjam: @christian-camargo
Art, Models and Animation by:
@Xist3nce
@Rhym
@Akmon
@1d10t_gaming
Development by:
@wospy
@BmanStudio
@Shunaky
Supported by:
@TolMera
Honourable mentions:
@voidsay for haunting, and for encouraging people who were looking for a team, to contact ours.
BUG FIX VERSION AVAILABLE
Hey all, Thank you so much for giving the game a try. The team did an awesome job, creating an awesome array of things for this game, a number of which could not be shown off. Especially all the music and audio effects, we have multiple effects for 6 different weapons hitting different surfaces, effects for the gunfire, effects for the reloads. The Audio guys did an awesome job and we just barely got to show of about 10% of all their awesome work.
We also didn't get to show off all the room variations, all of them has been created, but for some reason things just didn't go together as expected at the end.
But now the GOOD NEWS
Bugs that were fixed: The infinite loop just ended after the first boss room - The code had been written, but had not been hooked up in the release, but had been hooked up in private scenes (Unity) Gunshots - There was a bit of trouble with this, as it had been implemented multiple times - it's been corrected and the raycast system hooked up. The Boss floating in midair, I just dragged him down to the ground. The particle effects when oyu hit an enemy kinda sucked - this is because webGL looks different to unity's inbuilt player, so you couldn't see the sparks very well. We tweeked the particle system so you can see the sparks better. Game AI - It was confusing to the players, so I trimmed some of this down. World lighting - There were far too many lights in the scene, and they were making things very dark. I removed a bunch of them, and added one to the player to fix this bug. You now have light so you can see what's happening
MOUSE SENSITIVITY - The game is so much more sensitive on WebGL, the code for all of that had been written, but not correctly connected.
VOLUME CONTROL - I added some sliders for later development, but didn't hook them up, so this is purely graphical on the menu, and not a feature
I also attached the Health system to a couple of objects that had not been hooked up correctly, and shifted a few objects around a touch to stop different bugs, like running through walls and the AI wondering through closed doors.
I hope you like the game!
Twitter: @PixelProphecy played the game >>> https://www.twitch.tv/videos/781773613?t=00h20m48s Was cool to see them play, but this is the buggy version, if you play ;) play the bug-fixed HTML version.
Ratings
| Overall | 1441th | 2.958⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1522th | 2.525⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1407th | 2.693⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1315th | 3.018⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1053th | 3.284⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 610th | 3.393⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1169th | 2.057⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1072th | 3.142⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 64🗳️ | 79🗨️ |
Edit: btw the audio was awesome!
Was still pretty fun though. I liked the sound effects and the designs for the rooms. Good job!
@tygrak congrats on getting to the boss :)
I did the design and you definitely hit a bug that's not meant to be there, when you beat the boss and go through the next door, it's meant to send you back to the back of the train, respawn everything and you run the loop again.
There's meant to be multiple game endings, but I see they didn't make it into the final version of the scene.
We're sticking to the rules and are not going to be able to add the improved stuff until after scores have come in, but when that's all happened we might release an updated and polished version with all the bugs you guys found fixed up and polished.
Again, thank you all soooo much, this has been awesome.
Also, I'd highly recommend lighting up the doorways or showing some sort of indicator- players like me are stoopid. ^^;; Audio was great and on point- the game's graphics matched the atmosphere really well. Nicely done!
That said, I still couldn't get past the first 3 rooms - I don't know whether I'm aiming wrong, but these droids always take 4-5 hits to destroy, and quickly sap me of my HP :( The lighting is kinda tough too, it took me a while to find every next door.
Not giving a rating since I obviously didn't see much of the game - would be excited to come back when y'all release a more sparing version :) This looks like an ambitious undertaking that's worth checking out!
Overall, good work. How was the big team experience?
:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:
I found some bugs: the volume slider doesn't seem to change anything, the back button in the settings from the main menu doens't work and when you pause the game the first click actually shoots.
Other suggestions are: I would add some effect to make it clear to do damage to enemies (sometimes I didn't understand if I had actually hit or not), the minimum mouse sensitivity is still a bit too high (at least for me).
"Let me have a quick look"
"Ah yes the engine room here is made out of engine"
The void looked around "Oh hi there officer 418, didn't see you come in! Did you witness how this fine upstanding and well spoken gentleman was brutally shot, murdered even, in a hit and run assault? What callus creature would do such a thing? You must spring into action! The never ending train and hostages can wait. By the way did you see any hostages on your way here? Cause I haven't! Only those adorable bots that keep ignoring the laws of closed doors! They must be very ambitious copying higher dimensional beings just like me! I will let it slide this time. Dorky bunch."
"I'd help you officer, but unfortunately my shooting is kind of rusty. It's hard playing games when you're a disembodied face at best and a figment of imagination at worst."
The void went on a tangent once more. It had spent way too much time on this and the joke of writing in third person started to lose its appeal by the minute.
"Screw this" the dude behind the keyboard said, standing up and taking a quick stroll thru his room "from now on I write ooc"
Honestly I have three main issues
- The bullets are too slow. I presume that you used a physical bullet and the hit detection started failing at high speeds. One of the programmers might chip in to clarify my assumption. It has been a while since I played an arena shooter, but I am positive that they often use hitscan. Personally implementing hit scan might have been the better option here, since you're not doing anything special like bulletdrop or wind.
- Collision is weird on the geometry in each room. I had a chance to peek thru the veil when squishing myself in between boxes and falling out. Is the players collider set to discrete by any chance? I don't remember Unity doing such a poor job with collision.
- The difficulty isn't right. The only way to win a firefight is to strafe the robots at a certain distance having their bullets narrowly miss you while trying to compensate for the bullet traveling. Or you can, like me, angle geometry in such a way that you're covered from fire, but you can shoot back. The only way for me to get to the engine room was to do a pacifist speed run, ignoring all bots and bunny hopping dodging bullets left and right. Also the "boss" spawned in the floor and didn't fight me.
The exit in the lava room was difficult to use. If I didn't know where to look for it I wouldn't have seen it.
Also when I fell thru the world I noticed that the bots that I didn't kill where still at their positions in the now deleted rooms. It might get taxing on the processor having so many AI entities running scripts.
For some reason the exit from the engine room lead directly into the void... Oh no...
"Sorry, I blacked out for a moment" the void reappeared suddenly, almost as if the person writing it changed their mind, or perhaps by a slim chance the void is truly alive? "If you heard some hooman speaking please disregard!" the void pleaded "It is not real and it cannot hurt you"
The void continued speaking unphased by the occurrence moments ago. "Wonderful acoustics you have in here! The starry sky reminds me of home" reminiscent of times long gone the void paused
"Now excuse me" the void snapped back "I have important business to attend"
Just like it appeared the void was gone suddenly. Left in its place was the string as dictated by custom, reminding the supporting role that they are still one.
BTW: does the "go back" button in the main menus's settings not work?
The graphics, sound and the narration are really great! I hope there will be an update with a lower difficulty choice at some point ;)
Here's my two cents :D. "Go back" button doesn't work when i'm on the settings but I feel like people already said that ahah. I felt a bit lost while playing, didn't really have a clue what was going on. I couldn't manage the mouse sensitivity since I couldn't go back, so control wise, it's was way too sensitive. That's the few things that unfortunately kind of prevented me from enjoying the game to its fullest :( . But congrats for making it to the end with quite a huge team, must have been a challenge to manage!
Cheers!
I feel like reducing enemies damage output from 5 to 1 would help a lot, since you promote a unique plot more than fps game (or may be both?). Yet another option is to make enemies' projectiles larger and brighter and a bit slower to be able to dodge them.
Here is my attempt:
https://youtu.be/WcH6LMSJ8vM
@1d10t-gaming @100th-coin @akmon @allbetsareoff @antaresvaldemar @appoxgames @bmanstudio @christian-camargo @cncsounddesigner @coding4rtist @croped @diefleder @dominatorino @dreamarch @eldar @eldelhas @ericbolseiro @etrealjunior @eugenik @fadi-khoury @games-by-tom @human-writes-code @icxon @james-audio @johnsensei @joskerdu @ladymistleaf @michal-atlas @nerdytopic @obi-one @purpledartfrog @rhym @ruruie @savvy-community @seth-tal @shambles @shunaky @simplepotential @sneakysushi @somogy @spidertears @tolmera @tygrak @vetu11 @voidsay @wheybags @wospy @xist3nce
I wanted to send a notification, I hope you don't mind, but I've spent the few weeks since the jam working on bug fixes and things. I'm not one of the coders, I'm the "Support" guy, while I'm a capable programmer, I've had to learn unity from never having touched it before, to being able to read C# Scripts and hook up components, and problem solve things. It's been a hard couple of weeks, but I managed to hook up all the bits and pieces that the team had made, and I'm re-releasing the game with bugs fixed - Notes below and on the end of the game details page.
I hope you will consider giving the game another go, now that the bugs have been fixed. I did my best to stay within the Jam Rules - so I believe you should be fine to adjust your rating if you think something is better now than when you saw the game last - Audio, Graphics, Mood, Humour or Overall. I've done my best to just bring out the gems that were already there, the stories that had been written and the assets that had been created. I would love to make sure the skills of the people who joined my team get shown off to the maximum and if their scores for the different areas they were responsible for get a small bump, I would be really happy.
Change notes follow, but just before I do that, I just want to say thank you for reading this far :)
I hope you have an awesome score as well when the results come out (3 days ahhh!)
# BUG FIX VERSION AVAILABLE #
But now the GOOD NEWS <In your best Farnsworth>
We have re-released the game! https://ld47-webhost-postjam.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html
Now with 100% more bug fixes - no new features - so it should be inline with the rules if you want to re-rate the work :) but I will understand as well if you stick with your original rating.
Bugs that were fixed:
The infinite loop just ended after the first boss room - The code had been written, but had not been hooked up in the release, but had been hooked up in private scenes (Unity)
Gunshots - There was a bit of trouble with this, as it had been implemented multiple times - it's been corrected and the raycast system hooked up.
The Boss floating in midair, I just dragged him down to the ground.
The particle effects when oyu hit an enemy kinda sucked - this is because webGL looks different to unity's inbuilt player, so you couldn't see the sparks very well. We tweeked the particle system so you can see the sparks better.
Game AI - It was confusing to the players, so I trimmed some of this down.
World lighting - There were far too many lights in the scene, and they were making things very dark. I removed a bunch of them, and added one to the player to fix this bug. You now have light so you can see what's happening
MOUSE SENSITIVITY - The game is so much more sensitive on WebGL, the code for all of that had been written, but not correctly connected.
VOLUME CONTROL - I added some sliders for later development, but didn't hook them up, so this is purely graphical on the menu, and not a feature
I also attached the Health system to a couple of objects that had not been hooked up correctly, and shifted a few objects around a touch to stop different bugs, like running through walls and the AI wondering through closed doors.
I hope you like the game!
- "Press F" message is stuck on the screen the whole time
- It seems like the scenes are randomly cycled on each playthrough?
- I like that you tuned down the difficulty a lot; now I could actually play the game :D
- This time I could actually appreciate the music (last time all I could do was chaotically shoot and duck) - it's great!
- I can also see assets better, and while Ouroboros is no Bioshock, it's still impressive!
- It looks like the doors now block bullets (and robots' vision) even when they are open. I remember that previously they could shoot me even through walls
- The first time I got to the boiler room, I immediately went around the boss to the left, and fell into the endless space (not sure whether I got to open the door or not)
- Afterwards, I managed to not fall into space, with both killing the boss and ignoring the boss. I think the text at the lever mentions that I killed the boss either way. It also seems like I could choose to pull the level in text, but still ignore the lever and continue onwards.
- Then I read the spoilers in the description saying that I should talk to NPC, but neither pressing F nor E next to it did anything. What does the boss say? :(
All in all, I had fun playing! Cheers!
Yea that "Press F" message really did get on my nerves, I don't know why it's there, and being "fresh" to Unity, and working iwth other guys code, I don't know what I did that made that stuck on the screen. It also does not change any more to hint when you should press F... sigh.
The carriages cycle randomly between 5 designs that the guys made. Each time you go through the train, each time you "loop" the train is destroyed and regenerates as you go through.
I don't know if you noticed the difficulty increases each time you kill the boss? It's not fast difficulty progression, but should make each room more challenging as you go through.
The Enemy can't see you through most obstacles now (way it was meant to be) so you can hide behind a box while it's scanning for you, of ninja off the stuff in the environment to stay out of scanning height.
I'm glad you liked the Music, @fadi-khoury was responsible for the music, I probably didn't do a great job with balancing it, and might have tracks overlapping, but we thought it was very cool, and meant to give more of the sense of being on a train. If you listen to it with the thought that you're on a train, you can hear the wheels and bumps in the track :)
I'm glad you could see better, that was the first think I fixed lol :) there are only 2 lights on the player, and a ma of 2 lights in any one carriage.
You're right about the robots being able to shoot you through walls last time. That was "fun"...
Anyway, you're right that's fixed. And most obstacles block the enemy bullets now. You might have noticed the bullets also bounce :) When the enemy is shooting at you, they shoot in I think a 20degree cone, and if you're hiding behind something like a tree or shelf, you can see the bullets bounce off obstacles :). I would have pushed this a little further, but to stay inside the rules, I didn't make the bullets damage the enemy (friendly fire)
(Ahh darn that window) I forgot about that bug, hah, I might have to re-re-release *sigh*
I do know there's another bug there that I created and just ran out of time to fix, which was if you jump into that pit, then walk into the next room, then go back into the pit, it teleports you out into space where you will fall forever (or until 64 bits overflow I guess.)
Yea the text on the Lever about killing the boss, I really was not sure about including that, because you don't have to kill the boss to win, and you might not kill him... also I don't like to say you "killed' him, since this is a kid friendly game (mostly). There's a secret in that room that will give you the second (true) ending, and shooting at the boss is just a hint to it.
The NPC text on the boss stopped working, again because I'm a unity Noob, I didn't know how to put it back in. One of the guys might see this and fix it for us :) but the boss just says:
"So you've arrived! Is this the first time we're meeting? It doesn't matter though, there's only one of you, you're never going to be able to beat all of me.
"I'm ready for you, bring it!"
Real top notch writing right there by yours truly. lol :)
Last think, the lever, you have the whole dialogue and you can say "pull the lever" but we didn't want that to happen automatically from the dialogue, we wanted the player to go and physically pull the lever themselves, so there was this real personal decision to pull the lever. There's meant to be a bit of tension about pulling the lever because the player while "winning" is also giving up on finding a way to actually end the paradox. So the dialogue gives the player an "out" by saying "as per protocol" but the outro says how the passengers are disoriented suggesting that something bad has happened to them. If we took this further I would grow that side of the game a little, and have the NPCs in the train so you could see/talkto them. All stuff we wanted and had text and voice acting for, but didn't get into the game because we didn't have a model for the NPC's...
Well that's 4000 words!!! Sorry for being so verbose :)
I really liked the graphics and sound effects.The default sensitivity of the game was too much at first but I got used to it also i think game will be more enjoyable if robots deal 1 damage instead of 5.Overall game is pretty cool, good job !
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/781773613?t=00h20m48s
Was very cool to see them play, but this is the buggy version, if you play ;) play the bug-fixed HTML version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15n2Eq8yeVA
(video will unlock in 18 hrs from now, sorry about that)
Thanks for submitting! 😊
Thanks for playing!
I really liked the audio and the overall atmosphere
I saw the platforms in the lava and the guy who invokes robots two or three times but then when I went though the door I got in outerspace :/
Apart from that little glitch it was very good experience :)
Edit: It happened again and I definitely was on the postjam version. I think it may happen when you rush to the door and spam f, though I'm not entirely sure. It was again after the room with the guy that spawn robots
I hoped that noone would "go back" into the other room once they went into the second room, but I guess my collider is a little small, so if you run at the door and spam F, you might pop out of and back into the trigger box, throwing you into outer space :-/
Thank you for the bug report :)