Clock Work: Wake-Up Call

ou Travail d’horloger

The inside of this clock world is operated by simple commands, but getting where you want is less simple!

Guide the propelled alarm clock through the gears of this machinery to wake some sleepy friends up, while avoiding to crash it — which can happen in a variety of ways…

Made with Love2D.

[Warning: the prototype is unfinished, as just a few two, three though heavy bugs break the game; because of this, I merely made (7) levels roughly demonstrating the mechanics. Publishing it already for the record, but I still have to fix it. Consider it as a semi-finished/broken prototype for a concept that may be interesting. In particular, starting with a left button press seems to shift rotation incorrectly and I have to figure out why.]

Controls

1. Left Arrow: operate machinery ‘left’
2. Right Arrow: operate machinery ‘right’
3. Space:
   1. press: propel alarm clock
   2. hold: destroy alarm clock (try level again)

PROTIP: use F1 to skip the current level, F2 to go back to the previous level. This is not really breaking the 3-button constraint, as this is only for testing convenience purposes.

Creation context

Made for Mini Jam 112 with theme ‘Chrono’ and limitation ‘Only 3 Buttons’. (Running time: from August 5th 2022 at 6:00 AM to August 8th 2022 at 6:00 AM.)

The game was really designed with the constraint (rather than the theme) as the main focus of the gameplay, in the spirit of the game jam, although the theme also guided some mechanics (especially the gear wheel notion and the by-notch operating, as in a clock).

Amusingly, I had to start late (second time this happens) and was treated with several setbacks, so… the game was too late for the voting period. Once again. Still feel free to comment on the idea (I have plans for extensions, such as different mechanisms instead of just gears).

Credits Music

• Enter the Maze Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
  Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
  

Sounds

• "Bike, Chain Spinning, Fast, 02-01.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org
• "mechanical alarm clock" by gecop at Freesound.org
  
• "Falling, Comedic, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org (excerpt)
  
• "Explosion" by Iwiploppenisse at Freesound.org
• "Man grunt, struggling.wav" bt LayZerg at Freesound.org
• "Rooster Calling, Close, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org

Some gameplay-related notes

• For the moment, there are some breaking bugs, in particular related to how the moving elements connect to the nearest notch of a cog.
• Mechanics and plans: the core idea is that the mechanisms make up for the 3-button controls by defining synchronous trajectories, while the third button (and falling!) allows the player to switch trajectories. A natural extension would be to have other mechanisms than cogs, such as linear two-sided conveyor belts, motionless matter, rotative spots (which are really zero-radius gears), but I was also thinking obstacles could be possible, such as giant (clock) hands. I could already manage to have arbitrary number of notches, both directions, sticky and non-sticky gears — including gravity.
• I was wondering whether to allow the player to gauge how much propelling power he could put, and decided on letting less possibilities for the sake of simplicity. If the game or a variant takes a more action-oriented turn, it would make more sense; I did not want to let dexterity play a role when I settled for a puzzle orientation (which can stil change!).
• As hinted by level 7, the game does handle multiple alarm clocks. :)
• I had plans for some cunning levels, but had to rush it; stay tuned for recrafted levels.
• Notice the colour progression inside the alarm clock; I was considering using it as an integrated UI indication of either a time limit, a limited amount of turns, or how much damage had been taken (from getting hit by those unnerved purple squires). ;)

A technical note

• No navigator version for the moment, as I did not use Ct.js, and love.js has some problems that I must solve for games to work properly. Anyway, there are Linux, macOS, and Windows desktop versions; please tell me if any version does not work properly.