Coyote Time Lord by Clement Sparrow
Delay the inevitable consequences of your actions and defy gravity in this little (but it's bigger inside) puzzle game.
Length and difficulty
There are 11 levels in the game, in the difficulty range from "relatively easy" to "requires new ways of thinking the problem". Should be easier than Braid but harder than Monument Valley. You may get stuck on a level, but probably not for a long time.
Gameplay and keys
- Your goal is to reach the blue doors to the right of each level.
- You can activate/deactivate a golden ring around you with the keys Enter/Space/X.
- When a golden object is in the ring, it will get "Coyote time":
- instead of reacting immediately to the forces acting on it, the reaction will be delayed
- when a reaction is delayed, a counter is displayed on the object and it cannot react to other forces
- but you can still interact with the object (as you're the source of this power)
- Keys:
- arrow keys to move your avatar and select in menus
- X/Enter/Space to activate/deactivate the ring, close text screens and select from the menu
- R to restart a level
- Z to undo (can also undo a restart: press R to see the initial state of the level and then Z to get back to where you were)
- Escape to access the menu / pause the game
- Progression (last level reached) is saved automatically.
Tools used
- Garage Band for the music.
- Everything else was done in Pattern:Script, a heavily modified fork of Increpare's PuzzleScript. Including:
- Sound effects generation with sfxr, and
- Project sharing through a GitHub gist.
| Link | https://clement-sparrow.itch.io/coyote-time-lord |
| game code for the Pattern:Script engine | https://gist.github.com/ClementSparrow/a05b012f072a84c5d9af5d8f441cb832 |
| source code of the engine | https://github.com/ClementSparrow/Pattern-Script |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/coyote-time-lord |
Ratings
| Overall | 781th | 3.467⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 672th | 3.4⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 262th | 3.733⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1107th | 3.241⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1109th | 2.983⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 603th | 3.328⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1005th | 2.38⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 997th | 3.183⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
@quinn-patrick: Yes it's a puzzle game that relies more on exploration of mechanics and experimentation than applying logic on known rules. And in a few instances it can require a big leap in the way you think about the problem to solve. I'm really sorry if it was frustrating for you. Thanks for letting us know. The expected experience was slightly more on the casual side than on the hardcore puzzler side. We even spent a full day redesigning some mechanics to make them easier to understand, and adding a few puzzles to better introduce some ideas, but we lacked time to do another round of playtests, redesign and difficulty tuning.
@pdotjpg: You've stopped halfway. There is another important mechanic introduced in the next level :slight_smile:
@greymouth, @dkmk100, @cottontshirtz: Thanks for the kind words, it's very appreciated :smiley:
Well, I got the heaviness part, but there's nothing to prevent me to climb on the crate when it's all alone. That's what's frustrating.
(for those interested, there is a whole puzzle game about this mechanic only, it's called Cratopia).
Edit: Or if the controls would only react on button presses and not if I hold a key.
A tutorial is seriously needed to make this game good.
Like you said, its pretty cool to see a game based on a similar concept but that is totally different. But also to see some shared mechanics like the piston/banana peel mechanic.
Now some thoughts to the puzzles:
* I got stuck on one level for some time (based on previous comments I suspect it was level 6) But the level was cool. It felt like you already saw all possible ways until you get the idea for the solution!
* Level 10 also took me a little while, but I liked this funny setup and the solution felt nice
* One super tiny nitpick: In the first levels it felt a bit unintuitive that you lose when a golden block falls out of the level and it seems like this rule doesn't apply to later level (simply because there is no pit) Maybe this rule could be cut when the levels using it get slightly redesigned?
@oadt yeah, the pits where actually a relatively late addition and were not tested a lot. I initially added them to remove a red herring in a hard level but that was not working in that level. I thought it would add a nice tension in the other levels, but you're right it's probably better to keep it simple and remove the pits.
The mechanics *and* the levels are great here ( I wasn't expecting so much puzzle potential for such a simple mechanic )
One nitpick: the sound of golden ring is *loud*. But I didn't want to lower my speakers volume, because the music is cool :-)
@ace17 Thank you very much! :-) You can mute the game sounds with the M key without muting the music. It's supposed to be a bug, but in your case that could be a useful feature :laughing:. The engine we use does not support background music very well currently, so we had to add quickly some basic support for that, and adding a volume slider required too many modifications to the engine. Sorry about that!