Thank you for your kind words! The first patches will be bugfixes and refactors for sure, the backend started looking like a mess towards the end as time was running out haha!

Thank you for giving it a shot! Maybe I should update the control section to only include one of the control schemes. The only existing binds are WASD, Q, E, shift and space, but they are available for left-handed players so a bunch of the binds are duplicated around the keyboard.

Thank you! the vision cones are supposed to be invisible for enemies and the player's vision limited to their cone only (the rest would be obscured). We did not manage to finish them in time.

This is some very solid gameplay and art, I like it a lot! <3 to the music/sound too

This is great! I like the art style a lot, I see a lot of potential there. I think the only missing mention is that wall jumps are a thing and I found myself dumbstruck trying to reach a platform!

Ah, yes, I do like myself a bit of bullet hell! This is a great use of time travel, at first I found it really hard to use effectively, but as your mind adapts to how the projectiles move through time in relation to you it gets more and more intuitive. I personally find it unwieldy that you can't shoot backwards and have to wait for enemies to pass in front if they come from the bottom of the screen, but it does force you to dodge and not instantly spawn kill! Overall great success, I like it!

[From David AKA Goruku, main game designer and time programming]

The original time travel idea comes from one of the solutions to the grandfather paradox with alternate timelines. Essentially any act of time travel creates a new pocket reality and you may never come back to your original reality (since coming back is itself a branch, it didn't happen the first time). This allows you to influence the timeline without influencing your own past, because that timeline's version of you is not YOUR past, thus the grandfather paradox is avoided.

In that framework, the possibilities are technically limitless, you can branch at any time anywhere, to any existing branch, and this becomes more of a logistical problem: you would have to keep the state of the world in memory at any time, every time, which is not sustainable.

This system has been a long-standing fascination of mine with time travel and I've been wanting to implement it for over 4 years, the fleshing out of the idea only happened earlier this year where thoughts about implementation limitation were conceptualized, although unfinished

A side solution is the system in 5D Chess with multiverse time-travel, but I personally dislike the movement between realities since in my interpretation that would branch too. I did hear about Quantum League and seen some gameplay, but I don't recall it being a source of inspiration for the pulse system itself (surely it may have influenced though), the replay of instructions was a side product of memory limitations, but it was mainly inspired from the replay system Blizzard Entertainments uses for their RTS, of all places. To save on replay size, and since their gameplay is entirely deterministic, they only save the world state at keyframes, and replay inputs all stored chronologically in a big text file. We have a similar system but are running concurrent replays (what you play is actually a live replay of your timeline)

The pulse system is born of a need to only save the state of the world at specific points in time, since doing it every single frame or fixed interval would be unsustainable. The benefit though is giving fully functional power to the player's jumping capability without compromising the time travel rules by limiting the jump window and scope, it also provides players agency and choice as to their usage and resource management through time.

Please still rate it based on the version on this page, as it is the one turned in before the deadline. Tony's version has a camera + some AI fixes I couldn't include in the build.

Feel free to post any review here! Please do be as fair as possible (that does include harsh!), we'd love to see where to focus our attention for further development and improvements.

They can go in here, we are very much interested! We do know the gameplay is rather lacking (see inexistent) right now since we only started combat 2 days ago, the time travel mechanic itself took most of the development time. If you have any crazy ideas for the bucket list, feel free to share them!

You may see some of these crop up later in development!

A Jam about time

In its shortest description: Time traveling roguelite top-down looter shooter with branching timelines. Gunfire combat with near insta-death PvE, but with player precognition.

Beacon system: place a beacon to go backwards in time to the moment it was placed

Two options: Move your body backwards, this splits the timeline and adds instability

Move your mind backwards, this doesn’t split and doesn’t add instability: akin to savescumming

Placing beacons, or pulsing spends fuel.

Killing enemies rolls for loot (retroactively)

You have a primary (blue), secondary (orange), passive (two green symbols) and a fuel spender (up to 2 purple symbols). You find as you defeat enemies (kind of an arena looter-shooter) and the purple fuel that's dropped from specific enemies allows you to time travel or manipulate the battlefield (slow down local time, speed it up, precognition and timeline splits)

Artstyle:

Shades of grey for environment/enemies

Yellow for time travel or precognition

Blue for primary

Orange for secondary

Green for passives

Purple for fuel

Red blood?

Weapon Platform

Primary

Sniper Rifle

Shield

Pulse Rifle

Arc Drive

Auto Rifle

Gore cannon

Gather gore and shoot it (extra chunky)

Tether Lazer

Place spike on the ground, a lazer/plasma beam extends from the spike to you and cuts stuff up

Lethal Grenade

Secondary

Sidearms

Flak cannon/shotgun

Extendable saw blade

Utility grenades

Flash, stun, smoke

Back Booster

Speed boost

Bullet destroying pulse

Passives

Invisibility

360 Vision

Blow up on death

Recharge speed (overdrive)

Bleed

Corrosive

Holding charges up weapons

Speed on kill

Fuel Spender

Slow Grenades

Speed Grenades

Beacon

Pulse Emittor

Pulse grenades

Warp Drive

Time Travel

To avoid paradoxes, every time you create a copy of yourself, you must split the timeline. Any action, on your past self will not affect you since they are an alternate COPY of yourself. Precognition, or warping your mind, does not split (gameplay wise, a savescum)

Story

You start locked a room, a few moments later, a frame like you with a smaller identifier warps in your room. You kill them and gain the key to exit as well as your base loadout. After defeating the waves of enemy, a final door opens with a fuel spending device. If you use it, you are warped back to the start and instantly killed. Camera pans to the killer and another playthrough starts