36Overflows

NOTICE: the camera itself has been a fickle matter, this prototype has a lot of issues with display, if you want to see (part of) the UI you will have to fullscreen.

Entirely made during https://itch.io/jam/a-jam-about-time !

36Overflows is a time-traveling arena twin-stick shooter

The player controls a drone stuck in a gauntlet and must survive using quick reflexes, good aim, and... time travel!

Player Controls:

Every keybind also works with regional equivalents (I.G. QWERTY -> AZERTY)

Keybind (QWERTY)ActionWASD, IJKL, arrow keysUp, Left, Down, Right MovementQ, U, /Active1 (Target Pulse)E, O, 'Active2 (Beacon Pulse)SpacePhysical JumpLeft Shift, Right ShiftMind Jump

A guide to Pulses, Time Jumps, and You!:

You can create pulses to time travel to using your active abilities

The Gray circles represent the positions of drones present at the moment of the pulse, you can jump back the moment of the pulse at any time, granted you are inside the white pulse circle.

The player lives on a timeline tree, once they pulses, they creates a branch. Every action the pulsing drone takes afterwards will be recorded on all child branches and replayed on jump.

A child branch may never influence its parent and siblings, and jumping resets the state of the world to the moment of the pulse. This creates 3 jump possibilities:

A regular jump, where the yellow drone goes back to pulse 1 and continues as cyan on the new child branch. The smaller arrow is the drone's perception of time.

An overwrite, where after first jumping and becoming cyan, the drone jumps again to the same pulse. Since the world state is reset to the original pulse 1, it's as if cyan never existed.

A hijack, where instead of physically jumping like the last two cases, the player hovered over one of the drones (gray circle) and pressed the mind jump key, overwriting the drone's parent given instructions and taking control of it without creating a copy of themselves.

Concept and Theme:

Well... we ran out of time!

The original concept had you start in a small chamber. A differently colored drone would appear with a high number on its back and you would destroy it for its gear (yes, swappable gear, and grand ideals!). This would constitute your starting loadout.

Throughout the gauntlet, enemies could drop equipment you could swap in your designated slots, honing on a playstyle. Once the gauntlet was over, you would advance in an opening door, jump through time in a new chamber, and get instantly killed by a different colored drone. Camera shifts to the new drone, and a new playtrough starts.

There was a talk about timeline instability: technically nothing stops you from jumping back in time 5 seconds and shooting yourself in the back of the head, doubling your loot. This was theoretically solved through a system we dubbed "timeline instability" where the act of jumping itself as well as rash timeline decisions made the game more unpredictable on further branches, this included but was not limited to drones from other timelines invading your own, not unlike what the player does on a regular basis.

An important feature that is missing from this prototype is player precognition: it made it in partly using mind hijacks to yourself (you saw a potential future), but it existed in concept much more granularly: enemies themselves would have a shade ahead of them foretelling their actions. This would allow a faster pace while still keeping some planning abilities for the player.

The player gear slots include Primary (blue shield), Secondary (orange sidearms), Active 1 (pulse grenades, in this version a pointed short pulse) and 2 (pulse beacon), Passive 1 and 2 (missing from this version)

Closing:

This is very much still in development! With more time on our hands, a lot of jam cleaning will be done for a more robust system. We may even add originally planned features