LudumData

Stolen Time by loginaut

[raw]
made by loginaut for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

Stolen Time

You've crash-landed on a primitive planet during a routine hunt for treasure. The tachyon drive has malfunctioned, and you'll need to find an alternative source of power. There have been some strange readings coming from this planet, and they're making your defunct teleporter light up. Perhaps it's not the useless piece of junk you were led to believe.

Screenshot.png

:bug: Fixes: 11:40 pm - Fixed an issue with awake() vs start() in the build that caused an important UI element to not appear when reaching the temple.

Gameplay/Controls: Use WASD/Arrow Keys to move Hold Z and X (for approx 1 second) to use your abilities (GUI elements on top of page show when they're available) Press F to interact with the (one) NPC when the prompt on the bottom of the screen appears. If you manage to get outside the bounds of the world you'll have to restart. We tried our best, sorry! Exit: Alt-F4 (Sorry!)

If you mysteriously end up back in the center of town it's because you've ended up somewhere dangerous (e.g., the middle of a river).

:exclamation: HINTS :exclamation: - There are two puzzles to solve, each ends when you reach one of the crystals - Try to find the big crystal first, it's giving off some strange readings - You must touch the small crystal before you can touch the big crystal - If you get suck (after seeing the big crystal), hold x for about two seconds. The UI element may not appear at first...

Spoilers can be found in spoilers.txt in the game directory if you get stuck. This is a puzzle game, but we have no idea how easy/hard they will be!

Windows https://logiant.itch.io/stolen-time
Mac (Mono) https://logiant.itch.io/stolen-time
Github (source/walkthrough) https://github.com/LogJams/LD48/
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/stolen-time

Ratings

Overall 1381th 3.245⭐ 49🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1599th 2.83⭐ 49🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 815th 3.298⭐ 49🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1760th 2.688⭐ 50🧑‍⚖️
Humor 613th 3.056⭐ 47🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1348th 3.16⭐ 49🧑‍⚖️
Given 87🗳️ 79🗨️

Feedback

teenythanos
27. Apr 2021 · 02:13 UTC
Can't wait for the itch page! (Cries in Mac.) Would love a tag when it's live.
Kirby
27. Apr 2021 · 02:22 UTC
Game idea is super cool. Art work is also adorable. So , overwall great game.
Jesse J. Jones
27. Apr 2021 · 02:29 UTC
Pretty good start! Music is a bit repetitive, and you can get out of bounds by climbing up the first roof on the right (which is kinda fun, haha). I couldn't really figure out where to go or what to do, all paths seemed to be blocked off, and places you looked like you could go you couldn't go through. Got stuck and quit. Seems fun though! :)
KenLee
27. Apr 2021 · 02:30 UTC
Nice try
CrimOudin
27. Apr 2021 · 02:33 UTC
Didnt seem to have a way to do anything except run around the town and talk to people.
LDJam user 249705
27. Apr 2021 · 02:39 UTC
Didn't know what to do but the music was a bop
AdamsMcCall
27. Apr 2021 · 02:43 UTC
The game looks really good. I also liked the topdown view, it tickled my adventure vibe.

Sadly I just couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do. I looked up the spoilers.txt file, and I couldn't even do the first thing on the walkthrough. I did find the thing I'm supposed to be looking for but I have no idea how I am supposed to reach it. I looked around the village, even found a way to get out the map but to no avail.
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 02:45 UTC
@jesse-j-jones Thank you for the feedback! We have added hints to the game description to make it more comprehensible. This was our first attempt at making a puzzle game and we may have given too little information to the players, haha! Let us know if you have a chance to attempt it after the hints :)
imdigitaljim
27. Apr 2021 · 02:45 UTC
Very nice artwork! I couldnt get out of the town :( but the the controls and music were pretty good!
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 02:46 UTC
@sugarsugarsugar Thank you for the kind feedback! We have tried to add hints to help the user experience. Please let us know if you have a chance to attempt it after the hints :)
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 02:48 UTC
@crimoudin Thank you for pointing that out! We've added some hints on how to approach the objectives and the puzzles. This was our first attempt at designing a puzzle game and would enjoy more feedback if you have a chance to look at it again! :)
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 02:49 UTC
@kenlee @kirby Thank you guys!
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 02:59 UTC
@adamsmccall Thank you for trying our game and the feedback! :D So we updated the walk-through based on your feedback and made things much more precise. Also, did the x key work fine for you? If it did, we think you may enjoy the rest of the game with the first steps of the walkthrough :)
Jonathan Jennings
27. Apr 2021 · 02:59 UTC
This was a fun adventure , I love the textboxes, and the uses of them for both interactive purposes, just general background dialog, and some of the ambient cues and whatnot. I love the music and world design too it encourages exploration. Great work !
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 03:01 UTC
@imdigitaljim Thank you for the feedback! We now have a walkthrough because we made the puzzles too complicated and gave too little information in game! We'd love it if you get a chance to try it again with the hints and/or walkthrough :)
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 03:05 UTC
@jonathan-jennings Thank you so much! We tried our best in the time. I hope you were able to enjoy at least the first half of it! :D
CeltiCo
27. Apr 2021 · 03:09 UTC
I love the fields. Very nice. Music was also simple, but nostalgic (OSRS feels). I tried talking to the NPC but nothing seemed to happen. Lovely nostalgia though, hope to see you in LD49, cheers.
1minatur
27. Apr 2021 · 03:14 UTC
Not bad, but I agree with some of the other people who played. It's a little hard to figure out what to do, even with the spoiler hints. It's not very intuitive to go to the future, move to an area that was inaccessible in the past, and go back to the past to get through (I'm still not even sure if that's what I'm meant to do). I do love the idea though, and I think there's a lot you could do to build off of it and add more features. Well done!
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 03:39 UTC
@1minatur Thank you for the feedback! I agree that we should have definitely iterated the puzzles more and given a cleaner definition of the puzzle boundaries, etc. And you actually figured out the solution we intended! :D The solution also unlocks a more interesting environment to try out. Hope you had fun either way!
Winged Souls
27. Apr 2021 · 04:56 UTC
The artstyle in the screenshot drew me in and didn't disappoint when I got in game - so pretty, and a really cool concept of showing the difference in a world through time! Loved the music work too, especially the percussion sound in the "medieval" track!
AdamsMcCall
27. Apr 2021 · 11:22 UTC
@aditya-dave So I tried it again. I don't know if you updated the build but I swear that X icon wasn't there before when I was near the crystal in the temple.

So I got farther in the game and it was interesting to see the story of this world through various periods as if we're just spectator of history. Nice take on the deeper and deeper theme ! Still, I think the game lacks informations about where to go, what to do or how to do it. I know it's a puzzle game and I see what you tried with the characters dialogs to give hints to the player sometimes, but I still often felt lost and thats quite frustrating to me.
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 14:58 UTC
@adamsmccall Thanks for giving it a second go and the feedback! We definitely ran out of time to play test the puzzles and fine tune how the information is given to the player and how things are highlighted for usability. We also fixed a bug that stopped the x button from showing up the first time around. Glad that it made a noticable difference :)
aditya_dave
27. Apr 2021 · 14:59 UTC
@winged-souls thank you for the very kind comment! Because the concept was a bit ambitious, we actually ended up spending most of our time building the environments haha!
🎤 loginaut
27. Apr 2021 · 21:51 UTC
FYI, it's possible I uploaded a borked Mac build last night, it should be working now (I don't have mac to test on unfortunately). It turns out you shouldn't zip the .app file unity generates :laughing:

Hopefully you can get it working @teenythanos if you still want to check it out!
NachoLR
28. Apr 2021 · 14:36 UTC
I couldn't manage to understand what to do, after some conversations with the locals i had to quit. Sorry for being honest. Still great work!
Sodaro
28. Apr 2021 · 15:13 UTC
Wow, did not expect time traveling to 3 different time periods! Was stuck for a while until I tried another dialog option with the npc, which turned out to be important haha. The UI could have also been a lot larger, as I did not even notice it for the first few minutes... but it's hard to scale for multiple resolutions :)
Cheers for the unique experience!
aditya_dave
28. Apr 2021 · 15:46 UTC
@nacholr Thanks for letting us know how your experience was! We added a walk-through to the github page after a few people suggested that things were unclear. If you'd like to experience the different environments, do check it out. Either way, thank you for playing our game :D
aditya_dave
28. Apr 2021 · 15:49 UTC
@Sodaro I am glad you enjoyed at least parts of the experience. The first jump is "deeper" and the second jump is "deeper and deeper" into time xD. I agree that some of our UI and puzzles could be designed much better and made things much more clear. All the feedback is invaluable education on game design :D We did include a walkthrough as a band aid to help with the more un-intuitive parts but cheers that you explored and figured it out by yourself haha :D
Olima
28. Apr 2021 · 18:52 UTC
Amazing to see a proper 3D world with time travel in a jam :D Found it a bit hard but overall super cool!
Flopo
28. Apr 2021 · 19:33 UTC
interesting puzzle game, I enjoyed it!
tthe
28. Apr 2021 · 19:53 UTC
After running around for a bit I figured out a way to get out, found some secondary walls, got a way through them and finally fell of the map. Anyway, animations are great, assets are cool, and you also have some dialog mechanics working, so I would say it's complete on the technical side of things, I just wish I was motivated more to explore the challenges! I also liked the music.
Bea
28. Apr 2021 · 20:20 UTC
Kind of neat but I very quickly found myself off in the far unfinished parts of the level. Its quite easy to get out of bounds during the first puzzle. Had to start over after I got totally stuck in the river. Fun art and antagonist.
Vitor Milioni
28. Apr 2021 · 22:24 UTC
It's a cool idea, it's working rather well, i liked a lot of what it has to offer, it's a bit janky at times but that's not a problem at all, my criticism would probably be that there's no need for a limited time to spend on the alternate time, other than that it's rather solid, lacks a bit of direction specially at the start but i did have a lot of fun! With a game that big and ambitious you should probably hint not only at "what" to do, but also "where", i got super super lost at times xD great job everyone involved!
aditya_dave
30. Apr 2021 · 05:07 UTC
@vitor-milioni Thank you for the kind and detailed feedback. We did debate the time limit in the future and thought of it as a thematic inclusion haha. However, we are glad to receive more feedback regarding this aspect. Furthermore, sorry to hear that you were lost at times. We tried to retroactively fix this complaint by including hints and a walkthrough. Glad you enjoyed it though! And thank you for actually giving it the time of a complete play through despite some jank.
aditya_dave
30. Apr 2021 · 05:33 UTC
@bea thanks for playing the game so thoroughly and giving us feedback on your experience. We definitely patched some things up at the last minute because creating three environments took us much longer than anticipated haha. I'm also glad you had a chance to enjoy some of the dialogues and unravel some aspects of the antagonist! :D
aditya_dave
30. Apr 2021 · 05:36 UTC
@tthe thanks for the feedback and for exploring our world! We did have many more ideas and definitely could have polished the presentation a lot more... we just ended up taking so long to make the environments as good as we could haha. However, all the feedback is teaching us a lot and highlighting areas where we can improve player experience and fundamental game design, so it's pretty great :)
aditya_dave
30. Apr 2021 · 05:37 UTC
@olima @flopo Thank you for the kind words! So glad you enjoyed it and took the time to say something nice :D
vsi-
30. Apr 2021 · 14:29 UTC
really nice looking graphics, loke your game, gj!
Threeli
30. Apr 2021 · 18:16 UTC
This is a solid start to an experience. At first I though the game's assets were incongruous, but I see what you were going for (sonically and whatnot). I will mirror some of the other comments, that the UI/UX experience could be polished up a little, it was unclear when my abilities were available, even if I did figure it out fairly quickly.

I will say I liked how fluidly it controlled otherwise, I felt like the speed of both moment and discovery were nice. Seems like you've got the fundamental experience and idea down. Do you plan on continuing development after the fact? Either way, great work!
leorid
30. Apr 2021 · 18:21 UTC
That was a lot of running around, trying to interact with things until I figured out that it is movement based.
Checking what changed where and so on. Blocking the path back to the starting area probably saved some leg-work.

I liked the puzzles and the game overall, tho I really wanted to teleport (in time) next to the crytal, then touch it and go back to the starting area where it always said "I can't go back, the ship is not working" - to the ship.
I know, there was probably no spaceship asset, but a symbolic teleport ring or anything would've worked, I guess. ^^

Anyway, figuring out how the world deformed was fun, especially thanks to the well written dialogues.
aditya_dave
01. May 2021 · 02:28 UTC
@leorid Thanks a lot for playing the game so thoroughly. I'm glad you had a good time. I think you make a great suggestion. We did consider make a second half to the game where you steal the crystal, now the future timelines are all altered, and you have to escape with the crystal while jumping through the new timelines. Turns out that was way too ambitious and we could only manage a blackout as soon as you reach the crystal.
aditya_dave
01. May 2021 · 02:32 UTC
@threeli Thank you for playing and rating our game! I hope you enjoyed your time in our world. We are learning a lot about UI/UX from all the feedback we are receiving. We definitely could have tweaked things to make them more user friendly, but I think we ran out of time before we could iterate and polish the end product. As for continuing development, we are just three friends and grad students who worked on this game from passion, so maybe if there is really a ton of interest? Haha thanks for asking such a nice question!
LDJam user 236545
01. May 2021 · 03:24 UTC
I loved the time travel mechanic!

One technical problem I had was that the text was difficult to read at 4k resolution.

As a few others have said, it was tough to know what to do. I had to use the walkthrough on Github to make it through the game.

Good work!
ElSombrero
01. May 2021 · 04:01 UTC
Nice entry dude
wheybags
01. May 2021 · 15:06 UTC
As promised, here's a video of my playthrough: https://seafile.wheybags.com/f/41b434d83b8345bfb11c/

Also had the problem mentionedby @andrewkennedy of small UI on 4k. Overall, nice game, and I got the mechanics in the end. My main ask would be for more feedback on player action. It sometimes wasn't clear to me why something had happened.
aditya_dave
01. May 2021 · 15:53 UTC
@wheybags Thank you so much for the playthrough and all the valuable feedback! I especially enjoyed your insight into having a button just for feedback and to let the player know an interaction has taken place, like pressing "F" at the small crystal and the dead body. The UI is definitely something we will have to improve on. The time limits were supposed to help make the puzzles more interesting with time pressure, but do seem to hamper exploration for most players. Finally, it was so funny when you fell through the world the first time. I guess we made the land uneven and that led to a time travel under the main plane. Once again, thanks for playing and the very valuable feedback!
AR Borno
01. May 2021 · 15:54 UTC
Great Graphics, Game mechanics were also good. Great Job.
aditya_dave
01. May 2021 · 15:55 UTC
@andrewkennedy Thanks for playing the game and your feedback. We didn't realize how small the buttons would be on 4k! That is something to work on definitely. We did struggle with making the puzzles more intuitive but now have so much good feedback on things we could have done better. Next time we'll probably try to guide the player and highlight interact-able objects in some manner. Maybe even color the really out of bounds places differently.
aditya_dave
01. May 2021 · 15:56 UTC
@elsombrero Thanks a lot!
aditya_dave
01. May 2021 · 16:00 UTC
@ar-borno Thanks a lot for your kind comments! We did spend a lot of time on graphics and world building so its great that is paid off somewhat. :D
ColeSlaughter
02. May 2021 · 06:08 UTC
[Thanks for submitting your game to the stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1006873415?t=02h18m42s)

Sorry I managed to break it in such a spectacular fashion. :sweat_smile:

I like the core concept you have going on here. The idea that interactions you can have in the past can influence how things look in the future is very Chrono Trigger-esque. Only criticism I can think of is making it clearer to the player how the controls work. I probably would have had a hard time learning that I had to hold the buttons down to travel to different times, as there isn't any immediate feedback that anything's happening.

Other than that though, I say you have a very solid experience here. :thumbsup:
Meta-link
02. May 2021 · 11:09 UTC
Cool game ! It may be lacking a bit of explanations and feedbacks, but it is really smooth to play. I really liked the music !
Good job :slight_smile:
ruddiculous
03. May 2021 · 06:17 UTC
Man there are some really beautiful portions of level design in this. Great job on the look of this game. Definitely would ask for mooooore communication to the player and scaling up any UI. The more I know what I'm doing the more I can enjoy the beautiful world you've built! Nice work team, a memorable entry!
Togis
15. May 2021 · 09:41 UTC
As promise, I finally had time to play your game on stream :) Here is a link to the correct place in the video: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=Sx1MQ445u7k&t=9707s

What a impressive world building and a fun game mechanic. You made a very impressive game with really nice 3d art a cool game mechanic.

I don't have much to say except that I'm not sure I understand why the resolution needed to be 4 by 3. I guess this is an artistic choice on your part but the game would not loose any charm in full-screen and it would allow us to enjoy more your nicely decorated world.

This is not a major issue though, overall your game is amazing! Congrats.
aditya_dave
16. May 2021 · 00:22 UTC
@coleslaughter @meta-link @ruddiculous @togis Thanks a lot for your kind comments and feedback guys! And apologies for the very delayed response on our end. We are definitely learning a lot and seeing a lot of things we could not have observed on our own. I am glad that each of you had a positive overall experience with the design :D
asdehielo
18. May 2021 · 17:24 UTC
Really cool game, very interesting interpretation of the theme! I specially liked the second puzzle, where de actions in the present influenced the future.

It's a little bit easy to bug tho, I managed to get to the limits of the map once and fell through the ground another time, wich meant I had to restart :(

Overall a great game, and props for doing a 3d game that looks this good in such little time!