If you're on Windows you can download the game here, or play the web version here. If you don't see 3 vines on the downloadable version, try a different resolution. Something 16:9.
The planning was not very good, and in the end it turned into a real rush job. After the initial time limit, it turns out that Ludum Dare gives you an extra hour to submit your entries. We weren't able to take advantage of the extra time however, so we just barely managed to finish and turn it in. We'll probably be fixing the game up at a future time, but for now we'll just leave it as is.
It was a 4 person team of me, Kino, Skewer, and Omoroi. Since it was my decision to take part in the Ludum Dare, I was manager. I basically acted as leader and filled in whatever roll was missing. Kino was the lead programmer, he put together the platformer logic that let me edit the scripts later on to fit the vision. Pineappleskewer was the lead artist, she drew the idle enemy sprites as well as the background and splash art. And Omoroi was the advisor who helped in planning and scheduling. It was thanks to everyone's hard work that we were able to finish the game at all. After we were finished, everyone was excited to get to work on a new game jam project. Our first jam didn't go very smoothly at all, but the experience will be invaluable to us in the future.
As time went on I grew more and more impatient, and I know the rest of the team noticed. In my defense, I had spent over 12 hours animating sprites at this point (I find pixel art frustrating to make), and took a very quick tutorial on using Git in order to help with the scripting. Not to mention the entire time we were a day behind schedule. Those three days were so stressful that some of us had practically spent the entire next day just sleeping. Forgive me if I vent a little even while I'm writing this.
This Ludum Dare's theme was "Ancient Technology." The first idea was to use caveman tech, where inspiration was taken from these videos, but that didn't stick. We started tossing around concepts, and eventually the idea just came to me: "You're a cowboy with a revolver that somehow goes back in time. You shoot a guy, and now everyone worships you, but things start going wrong. You only have 5 bullets, and you need to help your worshippers win a war." Later on I began putting more emphasis on jumping on enemies, but Skewer suggested a whip which led to what we have now. The end result ended up more like a puzzle game crossed between Indiana Jones and Castlevania. Though the revolver idea didn't get implemented the name still references his gun, it's also a reference to Chrono Trigger.
What I learned:
We didn't plan very well at all. Some group members had other things going on during those 3 days that we couldn't plan ahead for. There was also too much put into the graphical work. My time was basically split 50/50 as I spent the entire first day animating the cowboy, half of the second day creating objects and animating enemies, and half the second and all of the third day was spent scripting and exporting. We could have fixed up all the glitches if I focused more on the programming, or maybe even have implemented more than one level. That's the point of a first outing though, I'll know more on the second attempt. Overall I'm happy with Time Trigger as a concept, and hope to continue work on it when I have more free time.
This last image works pretty much as a guide to the level. It was created to act as our final piece of concept art, where the idea was simply to recreate what was in the image. We succeeded in that, as this image can be used as a guide for completing the game.
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