Time Saver
English Description
Plot:
You are a ninja and you are here to save your world from mad scientists from the future. The problem is that you are not allowed to move too much due to broken time. Your goal is to reach the portal and close it using the time you have on your back.
How To Play:
The more units you kill - the more time you have. The time gained from killing units is added to your maximum amount of time in the next respawn and does not affect the current round. The unit which throws pockets will be aggressive only when you pass him when he isn't aggressive you can't kill him. You must kill all the enemies in order to finish the round, only then you will be able to close the portal.
Controls:
W A S D/Arrow keys - Movement
Space - Use selected item (Katana by default)
1, 2 - Select item to use
SHIFT - Sprint
List of changes in versions is available on GitHub
Web-version is always updated to the latest, so if you want to try previous, Jam-version, they are available to download
Русское Описание
Сюжет:
Ты - ниндзя и ты здесь чтобы спасти мир от безумных ученых, которые пришли в наш мир из временного разлома. Проблема в том, что ты можешь двигаться лишь пока в твоем баке бурлит время, если оно кончается - ты начинаешь весь уровень с нуля. Твоя задача - закрыть портал используя время из бака за твоей спиной.
Как Играть:
Чем больше врагов убиваешь - тем больше получаешь максимального времени при следующем возрождении. Юнит, кидающийся пакетами начинает на тебя злится когда ты проходишь мимо него дальше по уровню, и только когда он зол его можно убить. Необходимо сначала убить всех врагов, прежде чем закрыть портал, иначе ничего не сработает.
Управление:
W A S D/Стрелки - Ходьба
Пробел - Использовать выбранный предмет (По умолчанию катана)
1, 2 - Выбрать предмет для использования
SHIFT - Бегать
Comments193
P.S. Лайк за русский и за libGdx :)
P.S. Хех, ну а вообще там сугубо моя ошибка и неоткалиброванность игры, стоило над этим поработать, меня убивает то, что чел, который писал код уже лег спать и я могу лишь смотреть как люди говорят что игра позволяет убить лишь одного юнита(
If it helps, I'm playing on my Mac.
I had some trouble to understand how to regen' time but you explained
it nicely in the comments above.
It's not so easy to restrain yourself from moving to much, you have to wait for the enemies
to come at you... Nice take.
For what it's worth, I'm on Linux (NixOS)
```
chmod +x time-saver.jar
./time-saver.jar
```
Didn't work (it spewed a bunch of nonsense since it's not a proper Linux executable)
I was trying to `java -jar time-saver.jar` and got this error: https://gist.github.com/ramirez7/5f16adb111720b67fd6f6643cf1ac093
```
$ java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_242"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_242-b08)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.242-b08, mixed mode)
```
```sh
nix-env -iA nixos.xorg.libXxf86vm
```
my one major suggestion is that you make it really obvious how the game plays. I'm not sure how you'd do that, but overall it was a neat take on the theme and you should be proud! :grin:
Thank you, keep up the good work!
If there was something to improve, I had a pretty difficult time of getting past the enemies, and didn't manage to complete the whole game. I don't know, if I just sucked at the game, or I didn't spend enough time to kill enemies over and over again, it was still kind of hard to understand. If there was something I might have missed, I can gladly play this again if you tell me what to do! :D
Either way, the core mechanics of the game worked very nicely, didn't have problems with the movement or dashing.
I hope to see you guys in the next LD as well, and keep on improving! Good entry guys :)
PS: tried it once again but didnt manage to get time increase after killing the first unit
Very smartly made game. Everything worked nicely and the mechanics were very good. I liked the time bubble - it took me a couple of goes to work out what it meant.
Once I got the hang of it the difficulty was fairly easy but it took me 10 minutes to play which I think is perfect for a ludum dare game.
Graphics were mostly very good and the sounds effects that were in the game were good too although some more would have been nice! I'd have liked a message "You Win!" at the end :grin:
Well done :clap:
Great job!
@trexxak thx for so detailed feedback, i'm a designer of this project and I feel happy about you like aesthetic :3
@coding4rtist Thanks for feedback!!
@snowinn I'm glad to know you like an idea! Thx for feedback
@worblir Yes, you're right, you completed the level, thx for playing game till the end!
@beavergames heh, thx for feedback!
@geryon-games we've wrote in comments how to solve this problem, i believe everything will be okay
@sininenblue yes, introducing is a bit boring, but we'll try to improve it in the future!
@steffo thanks for feedback, i'm happy to know you like it!
I played your game during my livestream today. You can find my reaction here:
Very nice platformer. Takes a while to get into but super satisfying once you master the controls :D
@hadryel txh for feedback!
@kaabiikaze
@macaroni-dev
@nyubi
@geryon-games
@rhoff95
Hey, guys! We ported it to WEB! You can now play iy on HTML5!!!
but time run out very fast even after killing the fist enemy
also, there was a lack of theme
I liked the art even if it was a bit too much of a mix of different pixel size or art style.
The controls are smooth, the sound effects are good.
The core mechanic is smart and fits well to the theme, but I felt it was not conveyed efficiently to the player. Without reading the description, I did not understand that I gained time when killing enemies, since there is no visual or audio feedback, and it is delayed to the next loop.
Nice job making this game, I had fun 💕
Anyway, congratz on your entry. Love the art and animations.
It's really hard tho.
It looks good though, I like the color pallet.
With a tutorial and a scoring system, this could be an awesome game.
I liked the design and colors. Dashing through enemies is fun. I didn't really use my "potion" ability.
Anyway, great graphics, I love how enemies disappear when you pass through them with the katana.
The look was pretty hit or miss. There was a clear mismatch of two different styles, pixel art for the characters and cleaner vector style for everything else. Of course such thing can work too but here it seemed like just like a bit too big of a leap to me.
The design of the main character was pretty cool. Nice touch that the available time was also represented in the tank or whatever that was supposed to be. The dashing frame could have gotten some more love, I think it was just one of the walking ones right now. Something like make him lean forwards a bit more and give the sword some movement too.
The enemy sprites paled in comparison, they looked quite messy. And especially their potion throws looked janky as hell. The eye enemies looked pretty. The enemies overall could have used some animation love too.
No idea what is going on this end scene though...
The game controlled pretty nice. Especially late on the level when you start jump dashing and chain killing the eye enemies, it was quite fun. The second weapon felt completely unnecessary. Mainly because it was too awkward to use. Having the throwable bound to another button would have made more sense.
The goal of the game wasn't very clear either. Of course it wasn't too hard to guess but having one harder to kill enemy (I even though it was just decoration) at the start was just a dick move really. Having to do a complete new run because you didn't realize that was not too cool. Well, it was quite short anyway.
The sound effects were not great! Only few sound effects with no variance started really getting old fast. Especially that long deafening screech siren on death/spawn really starts getting annoying. And there was a bunch of stuff that didn't have a sound effect at all, really made these action seem insignificant. More feedback overall would have been nice. Like some sort of flash or other type of hit registering effect would have helped in the case of the "immortal guy" in the beginning. Stuff like that overall (screen shake too) would really help sell the weight behind all actions.
Anyways, good job! :thumbsup:
I tried a bunch of times, but I always run out of time pretty quickly. Otherwise the game looks good, congrats on your entry !
You start off really slow and at first I wanted to see if the game could be played without reading the how to in this page, and sadly can't. You should make it more clear about the time gain you get, because after 3/4 attempts I was a bit clueless and therefore went back to read the how to.
It's not a huge problem on a jam because you can put the how to in the main page, but I like more when the game can explain itself without reading too much.
I also had problems with using the sword at the beginning, and I guess it was because it took me a bit to realize the time was related to it too, maybe a feedback to specify why you can't use the ability would be nice!
The second skill was a bit useless, I mean it has its purpose, but it cost so much you can use just once =/
The pacing was off sadly (probably the biggest issue related to balance) it takes too much to be able to do something more than kill the first enemy, and even after that you require a lot of repetition. I guess the feeling of being stuck in a loop was there lol
I managed to keep going and complete this, but I definitely was bored after a bit.
I liked the sounds you used for the various actions, they fit the game atmosphere.
The dash/katana gives a good feeling (sound, visual, speed) and moving/killing with it was nice.
Sadly, you get too many different visual styles, the ui, the background, the sprites, are all different. It's not impossible to make the stick together but is hard for sure. The setup/stage was not bad, it was just a lot of different styles all together.
Overall, is a good starting point, and with some polish could become way more fun.
@toccio94 we will publish new beta version soon, and we will use your recommendations, thank you for such detailed feedback!
The balance of the game could be hard to maintain so kudos on making it playable for a jam.
Congratulations on the entry and all the best!
You've managed to balance it pretty well, now it's a lot more enjoyable and the pacing is way better, you start faster, it feels more dynamic. I liked a lot that you made the eyes killable only with the spheres (and maybe behind with the katana? not sure), now they have a purpose, and being not so expensive made me use them more.
It felt very nice to use a katana, then switch to sphere to launch 1-2 of theme to kill some eyes, then back to the katana. This time I truly felt like a ninja because I could move more and I could feel the increase of time in each run (more or less).
Now I can see potential in this, with more complex levels and more enemies so you have to move more to avoid and kill without getting hit.
Maybe two other things that could be improved are:
1. Having two buttons for katana and sphere, because having to switch is not the best
2. specify that when you kill a guy that it gives you more time, the simplest way could be to add a temporary +seconds near the timer when you kill that increase the max, but it is the simplest solution, not the best one for sure. This way I would understand very clearly how to go on.
Very well done on the balancing, and I'm glad to know you are putting effort in this to make it better =)
What I didn't enjoy is that is has some super frustrating aspects too. Mainly, I dislike that my first 10+ tries I don't even have enough time to beat the level, and I lose without it being my own fault. I'd call this "the bad kind of difficulty" and bad design. It should be possible (difficult, but possible) to beat the level on the first try. Right now, sure you have an interesting mechanic, but I'd say it isn't worth killing the fun so much.
Also one more frustrating detail - it's not always possible to use the projectile (weapon 2) and I can't figure out why... Does it recharge on killing enemies, or on cooldown, or...?
Anyway, this game sounds great and looks even better - I love the psychedelic vibe, reminded me a tiny bit of Hotline Miami. I was very much missing music though, some great synthwave would have been perfect!
The katana (weapon 1) is super satisfying to use, and the slash attack looks amazing. This game would do even better with even more juice.
Good job on this game! :purple_heart:
But I had to say that you should not blending two visual styles like pixel-art and vector-art, the result is... questionable in my opinion.
The adding time feature is quiet cool, but it took me a while to know that eyes can be killed only with the second weapons. And also zombies (I think they are zombies... ) should have at least another frame/position for a second or a half to warn the player that they will soon throw their bottle of... water ?
Nice try for a first timer :)
Keep going !
Thanks for submitting! 😊
A nice take on the theme, creative! Mechanics fit the theme perfectly. At first I had to figure out how the game worked but I learned it pretty quickly. The atmosphere of the game is cool, the sound is amazing and the visuals are great.
A minor thing that slightly annoyed me, however, was that the player hitbox sometimes felt a little large... (Or am I just bad at playing it?)
I can see this could turn out to be a cool game if you'd continue to work with the project, with polishing it and adding some content. (More levels, story etc.)
Anyways, I really enjoyed playing it! Nice job!
I liked the graphics and the audio and the overall presentation reminded me of Katana Zero.
My only gripe is that it wasnt clear why the eyeballs couldn't be killed with the Katana and others could. It wasn't hard to figure it out, but there was no indication that I would have to use the second item. This only bothered me because I was trying to be as efficient as possible and it felt like the game was punishing me for trying to kill the eyeballs with the Katana for no reason.
Maybe if there was some visual indicator like maybe the eyeball is on fire and when you touch it, your character gets burned which would force the player to think of another way to kill it.
Nice job! :D