Postmortem

The theme of the jam was Out of Time.

Specifically, it also mentioned the concept of displacement, and things that don't belong.

I took this concept of temporal displacement literally and made a game where the main mechanic is displacing boxes backwards through time to solve puzzles.

I also tried to implement the theme thematically by having a futuristic UI and mechanics contrast with the other visual styles (although due to running out of time they are all the medieval castle style placeholder oops)

The initial concept also had an element of actually also had running out time though the use of a move limit before a player character entered the Senario, but this idea was scrapped due to running out of time in the jam (heh) and didn't really add much to the puzzles anyway.

The mechanics that the final game uses are pretty much taken directly from the SciADV series, with a few minor tweaks to make it actually possible to make (I can’t completely predetermine the players actions lol).

This system of time travel does not have loops, and effects can exist without visible causes, wherein the cause has come from a previous no longer existing time (or World line to use SciADV terminology). It also completely avoids normal paradoxes since the entire timeline is rewritten when something breaks causality due to Interference (or in this case only the past for obvious reasons). 

Now that I have actually implemented this system, I feel like it works better as a story plot device than in a mechanical systems context, since it didn't really have as much depth to make interesting puzzles as I first thought.

I'm still happy with how the existing puzzles turned out, but I don't think there is much more to be explored without introducing new game mechanics unfortunately.

Also you might have noticed some parallels with Nonvolatile the game made for the original Patch Notes Game Jam, this is because I basically copied the project and updated it, which kinda means I took both paths in the jam (Using the theme to explore something new + updating/iterating on the original build)

Lastly, despite this time the jam being 10 days instead of 72 hours, I still only spent around 48 hours of actual development time again oops, and I actually ran out of time so that's why some placeholder things still exist (player character, walls tileset, etc)

(Also yes level 2 is a microban 1 reference just like in Nonvolatile :))

As of writing I don't really have much motivation to finish the game into what was originally intended, although I may come back to it sometime in the future if I get a burst of inspiration. I will however upload a post-jam bug fix update, since the jam build contains a pretty major issue caused by spamming inputs.