Thrice Upon A Time

Gosh, I loved this game. The Fire Emblem style portraits and music were a really nice addition to setting up the vibe of the world, and I admired seeing characters come full circle. The mechanics of the different games were also very good--I don't think I've experienced a more fun archery or fishing game in a while. Well done, keep at it!

It's really great that you made a story-based game for the game jam. I always love playing these. The story-within-a-story-within-a-story interpretation of the theme was great too.

You guys did an amazing job with the gameplay!

Amazing job! I loved getting to read about each character, and the mini-games were nice and fun. I like how the Archery one requires both releasing the shot at the right time and starting the shot at the right time.

@pharaohcity thanks for playing, I'm glad you appreciated the Fire Emblem-esque. We spent a lot of time tuning the minigames to feel good playing, I'm glad it paid off!

@boxedmeatrevolution thanks, its fun to write stories within stories!

@peace-of-cake-games I'm glad you liked the characters, we put a lot of heart into them! I'm proud of the Archery game, lining up your power meter and the moving targets can be pretty challenging, hope it's not too hard!

@sakura-magika Personally I think the difficulty of the archery game is *juuuuuust* right, it was challenging enough to be fun but not even close to ragequit level.

That was beautiful! Nice work! I enjoyed the mini games and it was a short but sweet story.

Great art and writing! If the mouths were animated with a bit of voice acting, this would feel like a genuine episode of an anime could easily watch a full season of.

now that's really a feel-good game :) I particularly enjoyed the archery game :D

I did not expect to see a game of this genre in this theme.) I don't think it really fits the LD48 theme, but I liked the music! And I had fun shooting the bow.)

Ooh I like this concept a lot! Very unique take on the theme- it was fun seeing the stories of each generation. It was also fun noticing how their designs evolved between their younger & older versions (and how their color schemes stayed the same). Nice work!

Nice game, it's fun and the storytelling is great, the Art is also really cool, same as the music. It was nice to discover each character. Good job !

3 different gameplays in a signle jam ! Well done ! :)

I like packing a storytelling game with various minigames. They all worked really nice even though I've already seen all of them. What I've had a problem with were the amount of characters, they are six of them and you spent about 2 minutes with every pair, 6 minutes is not enough even for 1.

super cool take on the theme, and the story was pretty interesting and kept me hooked! the minigames very also fun and played really well! good job!

I liked the first mini game a lot actually, each of them having different aspects were so cool. The link between people were a nice touch. Just wished that text audio was different, it broke me out of the atmosphere a lot, with the stories and the background music you can just eliminate the text sound.

@yeomsley thank you!

@pierce-brooks rumor has it that the anime adaptation is in production by Studio Gaynax and will be released Spring 3030 season!

@devemil i'm so glad, we worked especially hard to tune the archery to feel good.

@digitalmessiah we knew there would be plenty of mining and ocean diving games, so we wanted to have a fresh take by going deeper through stories within stories!

@brainloaf-studio thanks so much for playing our game! i'm glad you liked how the character designs change in different times, Azura did a great job with the character design!

@shin0nome i'm glad you liked the characters' stories!

@yamzho it was a lot to take on for a single game jam, but somehow we pulled through...

@octopussy aww, i'm glad you like them! it would be cool to explore their stories more in future games.

@megan-kozun thank you so much!

@sanemsky thanks for the feedback on the "speech tick" audio, it's definitely rather obnoxious. it was supposed to be just a placeholder, but we ran out of time. i just pushed an update to make it less obnoxious (i also fixed an incorrectly-labeled speaker). Tourmaline did such an amazing job with the music, i definitely don't want the speech noise to distract from it! i'm very glad you liked the games and the stories!

nice job ,alought seems a little boring to me :smile:

Hi everyone, I just published a Post Jam version that updates all the minigames with wonderful animations Azura Dark made but we didn't have time to implement during the game jam.
https://sakura-magika.itch.io/thrice-upon-a-time-post-jam-version

Nice art (I especially liked the Teacher) and pleasant music! The concept is interesting and going deeper and deeper through the memories of various people that interact with each other is very cool. I feel like this could be fleshed-out even more. But I know that jam time is very limited :)

From the mini-games, I enjoyed the archery the most. I felt like the fish got caught somewhat too easily in the fishing mini-game. My hook barely touched them, and they were already caught. This is some pro fishing :laughing:

Making a story game for a Ludum Dare is really impressive and while the minigames weren't incredible I felt they were enough to deliver the story and bring the game together as a nice package. Overall, really good job!

That was great! Wonderful story, graphics and music! Nice unique spin on the theme as well! I played the Jam version. My only nitpick was the dialog prompts interrupting when I wanted to keep shooting arrows.

@fabula-rasa thanks, i'm so glad you enjoyed it! our narrative definitely could have used some work, but i'm glad you liked the deeper through time / memories concept!

@roka-josh thanks for playing! it's hard to fit story and gameplay all into one weekend!

@sephy yay, thank you! i agree, the dialogue interrupting the gameplay is pretty obnoxious. we wanted it in there because its primarily a narrative game, but should have found a less intrusive way to deliver the dialogue during gameplay.