Team Eagle returns with Timebeam, a first person puzzle game based on the question: what happens if you can reverse time in a localised space?
See below for the tentative logo exploring our visual style:
Check out our previous game, Unfurl, which placed 22nd in LD26’s game jam!
Here’s a screenshot of how Timebeam currently looks in the Unity editor:
This doesn’t show anything interesting in terms of mechanics, but it’s an exploration of a visual style we feel may be compelling:
Stay tuned for some info on how the game’s actually supposed to work! Benjamin is still knee-deep in script but once we have some playable levels up and running, we’ll post them here (likely not with this visual style).
Beneath the surface is where it started, Obolos is where it ended. I’m still not sure how you pronounce it (we’re dutch), but that doesn’t matter
We had a blast, again. A team of two, from hating the theme’s guts to coming up with an exploration story-like (think Dear Esther meets Journey) game with multiplayer (because we felt like it). We almost ended up ditching the multiplayer altogether after one of us was already working on it for two days with almost no result.
Gameplay video
Spoilers after the break so make sure you finish the game before reading the rest.
What went wrong?
We both wanted to do something with multiplayer, we didn’t want to use photon or unity’s drop-in solutions because we wanted to save state ourselves on our server to be able to have some kind of persistence in the world. We first tried a socket.io + unity lib approach, which seemed to be buggy. My friend then burned a lot of time on trying to get his Haxe server-client code compiled to C# to use in Unity, and just trying to get some messages across. Eventually we found another socket.io unity library which did work properly and got it working on sunday evening.
We should’ve had something working before ludumdare on the server – client part, to avoid wasting 50% of the resources which could’ve been spent on the game itself.
Want went right?
Everything else basically, I could start on the boat rowing mechanics on the first day then pulled together some assets from the asset store (since we lacked an artist). I wasn’t really motivated on the 2nd day after messing around a lot with the buoyancy not doing what I want and having no clear purpose with where the game was headed until on the 3rd day when it all came together.
You were lost, on the river Styx, trying to get across by yourself since you couldn’t pay the fare. Since we went with the story/exploration like approach I wrote a short poem of which you would find parts in these crates drifting in the river. Slowly uncovering what was going on. The first idea would be finding a word at once but we realized that would take you quite a while, so we just split it up in 8 figuring the ludum dare audience would then be patient enough getting them all to get the full poem and hopefully figuring out what was up.
Now the multiplayer had to have a purpose, I mean, it’s cool to see other boats without anyone in them just rowing around but why are they there? We solved the visual ‘lacking a person in the boat’ by adding particle effects that would represent a ghost, also hinting towards the fact that you are also one and thus dead. Thinking of how to incorporate communication which isn’t just a chat that would pull you out of the experience we came up with representing every part of the poem that you’d find with a sentence or a word that you could then also speak by pressing the corresponding numbers (which other players would hear). I think it very well adds to the experience, except for the occasional player who just keeps spamming one voice 😀
As regarding to the theme, we started with the usual ‘monster beneath the sea’ but once we swiveled into the river styx direction we figured the ‘beneath the surface’ part would be you. In the real world, being dead. Buried, beneath the surface.
See you next ludum dare, if you want, you can play and rate Obolos here.
Bonus: google Obolos or Obol 😉
Enjoy rowing about in vr now :), you can find the download links on our ld game page (in the top of the description are the download links to the Oculus version, running out of space to link to stuff :D)
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=23493
It took some effort due to reflections and skyboxes not working properly on the rift and you need to do something special if you use NGUI to make it work with the rift, but that’s sorted out now.
And you haven’t even seen the turrets yet, check out our game here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23493
Check out this short ‘trailer’ to see what it’s about or play & rate it here. (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=23493)
tl;dr: if you have an idea but think it’s not fun enough, try it anyway if you can’t think of something better, you might be surprised
The longer read
The theme was a tough one again, at least one where it was hard to be creative since the theme described something (of course it can still be interpreted differently) which would result in a lot of visually (in broad terms) similar games. Think of planets, space, a double sided platformer or any side by side worlds where two things happen at once, when you have a theme like ‘chaos’ there isn’t really something that’s described. Anyway, enough about the theme.
After brainstorming a bit we quickly landed on the idea of taking it pretty literal and physically connect planets in space, with the humorous twist that you’re there to provide the galaxy with internet. Connecting planets with an ethernet cable (because why would you do this wirelessly, everyone knows it’s more efficient to just lay a cable!). We figured the rest of the mechanics would come along the way while building the cable physics and topdown spaceship movement.
It didn’t, we wondered at one point what the fun would be just flying around and connecting planets. Would it be time pressure?, Impending doom? Snapping cables? After having the rope physics and movement mostly done on the first day the other two were mostly spent pivotting and prototyping several gameplay ideas. What if you would be attacked by ufo’s and had to connect them to blow them up or had waves of asteroids coming which would screw up your cables and you had to reconnect them? What if it was some kind of tower defense this way that you had to purchase turrets!? (some of which you can see gif’d here)
Eventually we were running out of time and we still (in our minds) didn’t find anything fun yet, so with around 3 hours left on the clock we decided we just build the original idea. Connect the planets, everytime you connect one you get this extra sound track layer mixed. Added to that was the turrets that we built, figuring after you connect more and more planets these ‘enemy’ turrets would come trying to destroy your cable. How to defend against them? Just connect them to your cables / powered planets and they become yours
We realised that this was pretty fun after all, it’s not hard but it we didn’t have much time to balance everything out. And to be honest, it’s better to have it a bit too easy than impossible or very hard, especially when someone will play it for a short amount of time.
Our main lesson is learned is, something in your head might not seem to be fun, but if you don’t have any better ideas just prototype it instead of just trying to think of something better. Especially if you’re working with a tight schedule
With a game name made up by a cat you can’t really go wrong (yes, really)
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=23493
Get to the hospital before her growing belly explodes.
First time I ran it just worked, figured it would need some optimisation because ludum dare. Thanks to the default mapping of the ‘touch’ part of the apple tv remote to the dpad it worked out of the box, literally just switching targets and hitting build.
After that I took the time to try and figure out controls that made more sense, still want to try auto gyro steering as well but that isn’t easy to ‘just implement’.
If you haven’t played crooked town yet click the gif below to our game page!
Or here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-34/?action=preview&uid=23493
After 72 hours of programming, designing and playing we finally finished our game!
You can find our game here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=23493
