Topic: Off The Clock - Stop time! In space!

[guga2112]

I finished it. I liked it a lot, nice plot, nice humor, great art.

There's only one thing I would have changed, if I may:

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the first time you reactivate time, you can do it only when he thinks he's ready. As an adventure gamer I knew I had to take the ring because, you know, it's an adventure game, take everything you have in sight. But in game, the character had no reason to do so. The only goal for him was to wake up the guard. It made then sense later when the missile is closer and you have to cut the glass to reach it, but then you have already solved the ring puzzle.

But that's just nitpicking. Great game!

[Honza]

Thanks, glad you liked it! About that thing:

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I actually thought of that when I was making the game, but then I told myself I was overthinking it and it's just an adventure game, the character is not expected to have a reason for picking things up . In a way I'm pleasantly surprised that people actually notice these things, both ones I thought were pretty cool but small and ones I would criticize myself, which gives me hope that if I make games I'd like, others will like them too . The way the game is designed now, there is no way to make picking up the ring logical (you have to work towards picking it up before the first time jump, which is too early for the character to know why he's doing it), but maybe I should at least include some nudge-nudge wink-wink hint about him having a "hunch" or something into the "I'm not ready" line. I'll think about it, thanks for the feedback!

[Honza]

I recently uploaded a Linux version of the game and got this bug report:

The Problem is, that the game only occipies the right 50% of my screen and the left 50% are just Black. It looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/5If3Hcw

I have a Rzyen 5 1600, 16Gb RAM, a Geforce GTX 960 and am running Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon.

Edit: I have two monitors, maybe that is the issue somehow?

Unfortunately I don't have a Linux computer to test it myself, just compiled it in AGS and hoped for the best. Does anyone Linux-savvy have an idea what the issue could be?

[Crimson Wizard]

The Problem is, that the game only occipies the right 50% of my screen and the left 50% are just Black. It looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/5If3Hcw

<...>

Edit: I have two monitors, maybe that is the issue somehow?

Yes, this is because of multiple monitors, AGS linux port currently cannot detect multimonitor system and treats it as one big screen.
The workaround is to play in window scaled as much as fits into one monitor.

We hope this is going to be fixed after we change to using SDL library for rendering & window creations (in the next major update).

I'd also mention this just in case, there was a limited occurance of another problem: when you start the game in window for some reason it creates a very small window with only part of game in it.
This is "fixed" by moving window around a bit.

[Honza]

Thank you, I'll pass it on!

[missionjfrog]

That was brilliant! Had a lot of fun, was cackling at the end. Love the art.

[Miguel R. Fervenza]

I liked it a lot. Clever idea and great execution. Congratulations, Jan. I wrote some lines about the game (in Spanish): https://indiefence.miguelrfervenza.com/2021/01/que-se-cuece-enero-de-2021/#off. Now, I have even higher expectations for Truth be Trolled.

[Honza]

That was brilliant! Had a lot of fun, was cackling at the end. Love the art.

Thanks, glad you found it funny!

I liked it a lot. Clever idea and great execution. Congratulations, Jan. I wrote some lines about the game (in Spanish): https://indiefence.miguelrfervenza.com/2021/01/que-se-cuece-enero-de-2021/#off. Now, I have even higher expectations for Truth be Trolled.

Great, thank you for the review! I don't speak Spanish, but Google Translate did the job. I wonder what others thought of the slider puzzle - would the game have been better off without it? I often see this kind of minigame mentioned as a negative in reviews, but I personally kinda enjoy them . It's not a big deal in any case, just curious.

[Miguel R. Fervenza]

I liked it a lot. Clever idea and great execution. Congratulations, Jan. I wrote some lines about the game (in Spanish): https://indiefence.miguelrfervenza.com/2021/01/que-se-cuece-enero-de-2021/#off. Now, I have even higher expectations for Truth be Trolled.

Great, thank you for the review! I don't speak Spanish, but Google Translate did the job. I wonder what others thought of the slider puzzle - would the game have been better off without it? I often see this kind of minigame mentioned as a negative in reviews, but I personally kinda enjoy them . It's not a big deal in any case, just curious.

For me any adventure game is better without sliders (or mazes, or Towers of Hanoi, or Simons, or tic-tac-toes...), because a good adventure game puzzle has to take part of the story. But when you have to solved a slider, you are not thinking about the story, the characters, the context, the situation... The narration just stops until you solve it. If you extract the slider from your game, anyone can still solve the slider, they don't need to know anything about the story. The other puzzles in your game don't work out of context, they are integrated into the story, they are good adventure game puzzles. In addition, a slider inside the lift console looks totally artificial for me.

Slider aside, it's one of the best short adventure games I have ever played.

[Honza]

For me any adventure game is better without sliders (or mazes, or Towers of Hanoi, or Simons, or tic-tac-toes...), because a good adventure game puzzle has to take part of the story. But when you have to solved a slider, you are not thinking about the story, the characters, the context, the situation... The narration just stops until you solve it. If you extract the slider from your game, anyone can still solve the slider, they don't need to know anything about the story. The other puzzles in your game don't work out of context, they are integrated into the story, they are good adventure game puzzles. In addition, a slider inside the lift console looks totally artificial for me.

Slider aside, it's one of the best short adventure games I have ever played.

I see what you mean. In my mind, the puzzle was supposed to represent you being an engineer and fiddling with the elevator's mechanics. It's like lockpicking minigames - they have nothing to do with picking an actual lock, but by having the player do some strategic thinking combined with fine motor skills, they can make them feel like they are a skilled thief. Or combining diary notes in detective games - you often just click randomly without knowing what the result will be (at least I do ), but it simulates making clever deductions.

Really appreciate the kind words otherwise!

[Shadow1000]

My opinion is to use them, but sparingly. Miguel has a good point but you have the opposite extreme where you need to get the bottle for the mechanic so you can get the key to the house, which lets you get the hamburger so you can feed it to the dog in front of the bank so you can get enough money to use at the laundromat to clean the clown suit that you're going to use at the....you get the picture.

Too much of that flowchart-style gameplay eventually gets tedious, so when I rate games, one thing I like to look for is a good variety of puzzles. I really get annoyed by games that just slap you in the face with slider puzzles literally one after the next because of the reasons Miguel explained. So to have a small number of them, in proportion with the length of the game in addition to dialogue puzzles where you gather clues, inventory puzzles like I described in the first paragraph and so on does give a nice balance to the puzzle design.

Just my opinion, anyone is free to trash it

[cat]

I have created a hints thread for this game because I'm stuck:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=58797

[heltenjon]

I haven't gotten around to playing this before now, but I noticed the hype...and it was well deserved! Great game that shines in characters, plot, setting, graphics, puzzles, humour, frankly just about everything.  *Reaches for nomination button*

I found one logical inconsistency, which didn't bother me one bit:

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After stealing clothes, the crystal shard was still inside the defence machinery, but our hero would have had to use the lift in the meantime. 

Congratulations! Your game is fantastic.

[Honza]

I haven't gotten around to playing this before now, but I noticed the hype...and it was well deserved! Great game that shines in characters, plot, setting, graphics, puzzles, humour, frankly just about everything.  *Reaches for nomination button*

I found one logical inconsistency, which didn't bother me one bit:

Spoiler: ShowHide

After stealing clothes, the crystal shard was still inside the defence machinery, but our hero would have had to use the lift in the meantime. 

Congratulations! Your game is fantastic.

Wow, thank you very much!

Spoiler: ShowHide

Great catch with the faulty logic! I'm always genuinely happy when I see people actually care about this kind of details. It's the same as the thing Guga noticed: believe it or not, it actually did occur to me at one point, but I thought "meh, nobody's going to think about that, why waste time coding it". Next time I'll try not to be so lazy .

[KyriakosCH]

A very fun game, Well Done!!!