Warp Thread
In June, Outlands hosted a Game Jam with a random raffle-picked theme. This theme was "Mitosis." Sylvia, David, and myself worked hard to come up with a game idea that would properly fit.
While doing some surface level research on "mitosis," we came across an interesting fact. "Mitosis" stems from the Greek "μίτος," or "mitos." This roughly translates to "thread of the warp," or "warp thread."
Immediately, we took a liking to the phrase. Warp Thread was born- and the idea to use Mitosis now has context. Our big idea for gameplay was as follows:
You would solve puzzles by splitting (warping) reality (thread). Rooms would have multiple timelines to jump to and find things. The puzzle becomes a game of finding rooms and solving puzzles within them to change the world in other rooms
We had a plethora of ideas going into this, but unfortunately all of us were short on time, and most of the main content for the game never made it to this Game Jam.
Enjoy my crappy little prototype that was made in a few days- It includes items, inventory, dragging and dropping, save + loading, a pause menu, a debug pause menu, a "scene switcher" to change levels, and a door to open.
Additionally, I'm not sure why because I submitted this in a rush before work, it's a bit zoomed in.
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
i like the way you integrated the theme into your game! the concept is very interesting, i would love to see it explored further if you choose to continue developing this game or an iteration of it in the future.
despite the very short development time and your schedule difficulties, this is a pretty decent prototype. i have a few critiques, but it's nothing that more development time (which you unfortunately didn't have) wouldn't have fixed.
the controls are pretty unclear since there is no tutorial, prompt, or controls screen, and that paired with the zoomed-in version of the first stage makes it difficult to navigate at first. i didn't think i was moving at first because i wasn't able to see the edges of the stage. i was able to pick up after a few attempts that F is the button to interact with objects, but this was based on my previous knowledge of games with a similar control scheme.
another minor design issue is that the "merge" button is unclear in its functionality and the inventory does not have any indicator of which item was stored in which slot and which slot is currently occupied.
the puzzle itself also is not intuitive. i wasn't quite sure what the brown wall object was meant to be and the red item was unclear as well, so i didn't know what the goal of the puzzle was or what i was meant to do with the inventory. overall though, the pixel art was pretty well done and i really liked the design of the key.
in the end, i wasn't able to solve the puzzle. i tried several different combinations of the inventory but it didn't really do much except loop me back to the start. as i said, this prototype is still decent for the short time you had and i feel with more development time it can be fleshed out more and these small issues can be fixed! you both did a great job, congrats on completing your first game jam :)