What a ride! Making Time Travel Selfies have been so fun and so exhausting!

Let me tell you about its crazy development. Our team was comprised of a game designer, a coder, a 2d artist, a 3d artist and a musician.

Our main goal was to make an unpolished game in 48 hours and spend some hours from the last day tinkering it. The main reason was that we needed to keep on working in our main project (A Rite from the Stars). That takes us to our second goal: make a really different game. A Rite from the Stars is a 3D point and click adventure based on a mystical tribe. So we wanted to move away from that.

The idea of taking selfies of ancient pieces of technology in ancient times sounded appealing, so we started working right away.  Our game designer began studying score systems  from photography games (like Pokémon Snap, Afrika, etc) while our artists started choosing the theme (Ancient Greece) and assets. Meanwhile, our coder hero started to make a prototype of the Movement System (quite simple) and the Selfie System (a bit harder, because he had never done anything like that).

Characters concepts

We took a popular culture image of a scientific (Maurice Moss) and disguised him like a Greek. But it had to be a very bad disguise because the game is a parody.

After this, we decided to integrate the score system into a Facebook mock-up called Fakebook because it sounded so logical. Social networks are the common habitat of selfies. So the selfie would be scored by amount of object in frame, distance to the object and angle. Bonus points for extra pieces of ancient technology and NPCs in screen. These stats would be showed as Fakebook emotes and comments from users (we included ourselves and other members from Risin’ Goat).

Fakebook in all its glory

The problem was that creating Fakebook took a lot of time from our programmer. He spent almot a whole day doing it. Although we finished, this reduced the amount of time we had to test the score system. Anyway, in that picture you can appreciate that, as the character is blocking most of the Greek Fire behind him, comments are being harsh.

So, in addition of taking selfies, we added a small stealth system. Basically, if a Greek NPC sees you with a cellphone, you alter the past and the Space Time Continuum gets destroyed. This made the game more interesting as limits the time a player has to take a selfie.

The End of Time!!!

The musician composed music based on the “Zorba the Greek” movie.  That was not Ancient Greek Music, but it sounded Greek enough for a parody game like ours. The voices for Mass and the NPCs were made by him too (even the female ones).

We finished the game on Sunday and polished it on Monday. We had a last time issue with the screenshot  management in the build, but it was solved and the game was uploaded in time!

An advice for our future selves (hopefully Ludum Dare #37!): bring more programmers or design only one complex system.

PLAY IT HERE!!!