Sir, allow me to metaphorically tip my hat to you, as your exceptional achievement in completing my game leave me in utter admiration and awe. Whenever I create something to challenge even myself and then completing it having a surprisingly hard time in the process even though I know everything about my own game, someone comes and achieves the same without the necessary knowledge due to my complete failure of communicating them within the game itself, and I just can't comprehend the superiority in intelligence and the incredible dedication towards something I made. So let me add some more fun facts that you might find interesting, and that would make me completely shocked if you figured out yourself within the time you burned on my humble creation:
- The initial height of the falling blocks determine the exact half a second when they will fall. So this is why the first block next to the starting position of the player falls almost immediately, but the blocks on the roof fall as the last ones. Which also means that the higher you climb the later the floor you are standing on will fall during the first few seconds, so you have more time to explore safely without the need of reverting time.
- Climbing up and down the stairs takes one second in real time but only half in game time compared to the horizontal or vertical movement where the half a second is applicable both for real time and game time. This was not intentional, but trying to fix it caused other issues which I couldn't figure out quickly enough, so I decided to keep it as is, since it doesn't impact the game negatively.
Features that ended up on the cutting room floor due to the lack of time even though some of them would have made the game a lot easier to beat:
- Two additional viewports to show the past and the future, a nice way to emphasize the 4-dimensional maze aspect of the game. (Already partially implemented in the post jam version.)
- Cracks on the fallen blocks, flying dust around them frozen in time, highlighting that they "will" fly back up if you take one more step while the time is reverted. Cracks on the edges of the soon to be falling blocks to warn you before they fall.
- Prevent movement if a the future viewport already shows that a block would fall on the top of the players head, same for the past viewport in case the time is reverted.
- Windows to let you see the rain outside, its falling our raising droplets to visually help you see if time is reverted or not.
- Every block has a predefined time of falling unrelated to their height.
- And my favorite: A demon that is always flying towards you and can be killed only if lured under falling blocks, but every time you revert the time and travel back before its death you risk guiding it away from its original fate.
- And the one I regret the most that I had to leave out: Procedurally generated 4D dungeons. Theoretically I could have done it, I had plenty of experience with similar challenges, but when I got to it, I just couldn't wrap my head around preparing the maps that not only work as a challenging puzzle but also look good. That would have been truly infinite experience. Maybe next time.
And finally features that I tried out then removed because even though they were cool it made the gameplay itself really weird:
- Move forward: times move forward, move backward: times more backward. The concept felt really cool in practice but then it quickly turned into a weird waltz abruptly interrupted by falling blocks.
- Revert time without limitations. It was nice, but ended up just going back to 0 after every step, which made the whole game a walk in the park.
So that's it, a nice, long, reply to a nice, long, review.