Hiccup Time by Somogy
A wizard finally finalize his greatest creation, a potion that grants a special skill to those who take it.
What would be this incredible ability?
Controls:
Move: WASD, arrows
Action: E, Enter
We know about enemies bug! =P
## TIP: DON'T TRY RUSH!! Enjoy!
It's in the game credits, but to make it clear:
- ### we use a third party tileset (free): you can check here: https://0x72.itch.io/dungeontileset-ii
Please read carefully before rating:
- we had a wrong understanding of the rules and incorrectly added our game in the Audio and Graphics categories. Unfortunately, it is not possible to remove these categories at this point, so we ask you not to vote for these categories. Again we apologize for what happened.




| Youtube | https://nhydrus.itch.io/hiccup-time |
| Youtube | https://nhydrus.itch.io/hiccup-time-web |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/hiccup-time |
Ratings
| Overall | 692th | 3.577⭐ | 119🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 881th | 3.278⭐ | 119🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 218th | 3.889⭐ | 119🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 311th | 4.038⭐ | 119🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1042th | 3.296⭐ | 83🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 718th | 3.253⭐ | 87🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 222th | 3.677⭐ | 115🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 764th | 3.427⭐ | 112🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 196🗳️ | 236🗨️ |
I think the main mechanic was very innovative and has a lot of potential. I think my only problem is the lack of control I had over the "hiccup" and the small time window between each one. But the art was really cute and the puzzles were well made, overall it was a good experience!
It's a fun game, but i got stucked in a room the doors close and I could not leave :cry: .
Great job! :smiley:
The graphics, humor, soundtrack were all on spot.
I actually found the core mechanic very intuitive and straightfoward. You even added a redudancy by showing both the bars and the timer one the corner. And it was very funny to use because it made you feel clever. Except for the spikes, because all you had to do was wait for the right timing. I disliked that because the only "skill" it required was patience and didn't *feel* like it made use of the hiccup mechanics.
Interface-wise, I liked the message box in the bottom-right corner since it reminded me of old-school roguelike message logs, but I kept forgetting to check it for hints. That, in turn, made me take a good while to realize what was going on with my ingredients. For that matter, it also took me a while to understand I was even *getting* the ingredients. A more responsive UI would go a long way to help this.
All in all, I enjoyed the game quite a lot. Congratulations!
Also; I didn't quite catch how I got the yellow ingredient, I just had it all of sudden.
Good job!
Very enjoyfull game with great graphism and music.
You did a great job on this entry!
Had a lot of fun!
One of the best entry I played so far, congrats ! Maybe loosing the ingredients every time you get touched by monsters was a bit too much annoying, but overall it’s really cool ! 👍
Aside of that I tried to play but didn't get what to do with the very beginning of the game :<
About not understanding the game, you have a mechanic to go back in time. it works like this:
It has a timer, after 2 seconds, it generates a "shadow", and after another 2 seconds, you are teleported to this point.
For example, to get past the first door, you stay close to it until you generate the "shadow", and run to activate the lever. You will be teleported to the door with time to pass it.
"Graphics – How good the game looks, or how effective the visual style is. Nice artwork, excellent generated or geometric graphics, charming programmer art, etc."
@biancamello @finalforeach @wevel @kazuo256 Did you spotted that all graphic assets were used as is from that pack? https://0x72.itch.io/dungeontileset-ii
I think you didn't understand what is to be judged here, on the rules page it is written:
"Graphics - How good the game looks, or how effective the visual style is. Nice artwork, excellent generated or geometric graphics, charming programmer art, etc."
But let's go:
Some things were created by @somogy (there in the initial room).
The composition of the scenario was made by us, it is not a stuck and glued image, we had to think and compose each piece of the game.
We also had to make animations and effects.
These are things that fall within what is to be judged, according to the rules. So I don't feel like I'm cheating or being unfair.
@erlioniel , @wevel , @biancamello , @finalforeach , @kazuo256, i'm really sorry if at some point it looked like i tried to trick them
The problem here is that it is really hard to judge what's yours and what's not. And that's why you (in my opinion) should opt out the category next time. Now it's not possible to do, but I recommend to mark it clearly in the description.
And again, that's just a question of fair play. I'm not against you or the game. And for sure @somogy deserves respect for his art as well. But I think it's not fair to other participants of LD who did graphic by themselves.
the game is pretty solid in all aspect! congratz !!!
Was also surprised you guys didn't opt out of the graphics category considering you used a public tileset for the majority of the art in the game.
The only issue I faced is that the hiccup was too fast for me. Also I would have preferred to see one bar only that runs out one time for hiccups, then it would out a second time for the jump. All minor stuff.
Congrats!
@jose-bonilla @finalforeach @hakunasoft @wevel @bibicio @pedrohph @biancamello @fractalsunrise @eugenik @binaryprinciple @etrealjunior @odedro987 @drjexter @nolife-m @tori @ariya-reddy @wendel-scardua @krapht @kazuo256 @hank-ather @peringo @unicornfrog @tauheed-game-dev @elpadlos @ommadawn @vivoubos @carko @caeonosphere @jarvisp99 @blobo @tuatarian @shujal @tpsy @matthew-roelle @thesedatedprince @indieronin @lunarstrain @dotsquare @erlioniel @candlesan @tricky-fat-cat @tennotako @nsadie @olafstromberg @overlook-studios @moddingmachine @mcovert @msiddeek
The ingredient display glitched out all over. Sometimes grabbing one ingredient made another disappear from the menu and so on. Made it really confusing to understand and made it seem like you lose the collected ingredients with some trigger i.e. death or time. The lack of real end made it even more confusing. Having some sort of an outro before looping back to start would have been nice. I had to play the game twice since I wasn't sure if I beat it or what on the first one. I never noticed I had gathered the chest items (lollipop and yellow potion) since they had disappeared from the UI before noticing them.
The intro pacing was a bit off too. It was quite fast and having the text and the action itself be that separated meant that it was hard to follow both. I pretty much completely missed the whole idea the first time I saw it and only started to realize what was going on after bumbling around getting confused about the teleporting for like a half a minute.
And the UI didn't quite look great because it didn't scale properly. It looks nice on your screenshots but it looked like this to me.

Especially for the intro speech it was quite awkward. Having it in a speech bubble like that hiccup thing would have worked better in my opinion at least. Could even have gotten rid of the whole UI bar and have the icons just floating on top of the game view. Now it was just occupying quite a big portion of the screen real estate for pretty much no function at all. The timer there was completely pointless.
The hiccup timer bars were also quite confusing. Maybe just one pingponging bar would work better. :thinking: Like it would go from full to empty, then hiccup, slowly back to full, place the shadow and then just repeat like that.
I did not rate on graphics and audio as you requested but I can still comment about them. Looks like you didn't quite stick with the chosen tileset style. The bookshelf and book sprites (at least) didn't fit the look of everything else (no outline etc), were those straight from Minecraft? The hiccup bubble look weird with the half transparency. And the text on it wasn't centered vertically correctly. Were there like three different fonts? One on menu, second on timer/intro text area and last one on the hiccup bubble? And none of them really fit the tileset style either. Same goes for the hiccup bars, they had a different "pixel size" and the colors could have been picked from the tileset palette.
There was also some z-fighting issues. Quite often the order was correct (like with doors, bookshelves and those wall pillars) but some others (normal walls, weapon racks) always stayed behind the character. The blue particles were also always on top of everything so could be seen through closed doors and so on.
The music fit the game well and overall the sound effects were fine. Just the hiccupping effect got quite repetitive. Having few variations of it and playing them randomly would have been nice. Or just varying the pitch by a small percentage each time would also alleviate the repetitiveness.
Found a minor collision issue here.

And corners had these weird rounded colliders too.

Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:
As for the rest, the ingredients stealing was a bit frustrating when I had to go through all the levels when one potion was stolen, but overall a good entry!
Other than that though, very fun game! Good job!
BTW I just used the same tileset on one of my projects recently.
+interesting gameplay mechanic
-you could look to improve your LD page presentation a little for the next jam!
Really enjoyed your take on the theme with the humorous approach, great job.
I understood how to use it to my advantage, but unfortunately it was just too difficult for me to get very far in the game -- I had to surrender after a while :sweat_smile:
Which is a shame because from what I could tell, there's quite a bit of content in the level, for a jam game, and it seems well designed.
Maybe hiccup mechanic should be slower? But monsters are definitely unwelcome extra difficulty on top of everything :joy:
Good job on the game!
Shame about the bugs, the enemy collision one is pretty game breaking, maybe push an update?
We even know how to fix the enemy collision bug, but we chose to leave it in the original.
There was so much that we wanted to improve that we decided to work on a more elaborate project for this game in the future.
I felt that the timer on the hiccup was too short, after a while you just start feeling like you are fighting against your own game character to move forward.
Also I seem to don't completely understand the main goal of game - if it's to find all ingredients and make potion? Or I already start the game with this potion? Why then I need ingredients, what is their point? Maybe I do something wrong ? Would be glad to hear the answers!
Anyways, this game has a great potential!
Unfortunately we didn't have time to work on more cool puzzles with this mechanic (but we have already triggered a new game with this idea).
About the story, if you look below (in the menu) there are texts running, which explains that you took a potion that left you in this condition and is looking for ingredients to correct this error.
The monsters don't kill you, but they make you drop the ingredients, being very frustrating!
Thank you very much for the feedback
It was fun, but there are a few bugs. I haven't found any that weren't mentioned already.
Also frustrating, as stated by me and others, is the dreaded corridor on the left of the map.
But to add some new things: is there some way to fail completely? I found that monsters ate my ingredients if I didn't have the lollipop, do they respawn or are they always available? In the room with a lot of treasure chests I found the ingredient in one of them, so I am unsure, if there is 100 % way to find all of them all the time.
Also I want to know, is there a way to identify chest mimics before they eat your stuff?
The idea is solid, with little polish this would be greatly improved, I believe. Great entry, I played until revealing the secrets of the potion (wait, was that the beginning or not? :wink: )
The ingredients are always there, you can always return to get more.
No, there is no way to identify mimics, that's the idea, hehe
You can run away while they are waking up and shaking.
Having the back-in-time mechanic be involuntary was a refreshing take, and the introduction of it put a smile on my face that didn't fade for the whole game :). The music also fit the theme quite well.
I also liked that the hiccup was both a way to solve puzzle and a hindrance.
Waiting for the hiccup timer didn't bother me. As someone who suffers from long-going hiccups I've learned to deal with it ;)
I didn't get what I need th elollipo for, though. I beat the game without having it.
A little thing to improve would also be the info bar - took me quite some time to notice that there were notes when an enemy hit me. but that's just a minor thing.
The art was really nice and poignant. All assets look coherent and the art direction in general suits the game idea and mode fine. The soundtrack, while being nothing too special, still added to the overall mood and humor.
Going for a "loop" ending didn't really work for me though. I kinda hoped for an actual ending... but that decision was maybe due to time limitations. A lot of people did just reset their games after finishing them to try to add some easy points on the theme category. If it isn't really well implemented or is earned through story telling, it kinda sticks out like a sore thumb. In your example, I didn't really add anything for me. I even thought it was a bug at first because the reset was so abrupt after getting all the ingredients.
Still, these are really just minor gripes. I actually enjoyed myself playing the game :) Very well done!
At the end of the game, we were really running out of time (as was the rest of the development as well). Our idea of the hiccup loop was the theme, but we decided to make this final joke, going back in time exactly when he was going to take the wrong potion.
On "escaping the sameness of the theme": Man, it was from 7pm to 11pm on Friday just debating the topic. I'm glad you enjoyed our game.
Not rating you on Audio and Graphics as requested.
I wish I could get some sort of control over the hiccups but as the hiccups in real life there is no way to control them, haha!