The Story:

20XX, Mars. A team of 3 elite scientists are embarking on the maiden voyage of the first ever faster-than-light spacecraft. Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong. In a tragic accident, the ship ripped itself apart, and the three scientists got stranded in three different timelines, where they're each the sole survivor of the crash. While they can't directly interact with each other, things they collect are shared through their quantum-entangled backpack. Can they coordinate their efforts to gather everything they need to find a way back home, and more importantly, back into the same timeline?

About:

This game was originally made for the TAGD Spring '26 jam, with the theme of "Get with the Times". I've had the idea for making a game where you control a bunch of aliens lost in space for a long time now, and have wanted to make a game with similar platforming to TowerClimb for a good while now, so I decided to take this jam as an opportunity to do that. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple different issues along the way. 

Firstly, the ideas I had for the game didn't really fit for the jam. The original concept for the game was probably way too ambitious. As it was an idea I had been bouncing around for a while, I had big plans that I probably wouldn't be able to use for a jam. More importantly, though, trying to make it conform to the jam's presentation would've been a nightmare. A decently-lengthy game that's intended to be replayed and optimized is probably not good for something where the judges only spend about 5 minutes playing a game, and led to some strange issues on the design front. As I never even got around to implementing the main mechanic in-game, you can't really see it all that much just from playing it, though I will note that the one non-looping track in the game (or at least, it's not supposed to loop, though for some reason it still does) is trying to fit something with a lot of buildup into a single minute. Wanting the judges to not miss out on the character switch necessitated making the days uncomfortably short, which ended up making designing a lot of other stuff difficult, and I couldn't really land on an idea that would be fun to play (though, if you want a game that takes the concept of having a minute to live and makes it fun and interesting to play around, check out Minit, it's a ton of fun and I'd highly recommend it). 

More importantly, however, the game just wasn't all that fun to work on. Usually with these, we'd have in-person presentations and events, which I feel help me stay motivated a lot. Unfortunately, this semester, I have a class that falls right in the middle of the meetings, so I've had to miss every single one (except for one which I skipped class for, but don't tell the prof that!). Missing out on this aspect made it really difficult to stay motivated on the project, as being able to talk about the game and show things off makes working on it feel way more enjoyable (heck, the other game I worked on this semester, Dr. D.Structo, literally had an in-person tournament for me to get feedback for later balancing changes. I need to do something like that again, it was really fun), so it kinda just fell to the wayside as I was enjoying doing other stuff far more. I might revisit some stuff from this later, but if the game ever were to actually come out, it'd be way later, and would probably barely even resemble what it is now. 

The Controls:

• Arrow Keys - Move
• Z - Jump
• X - Use Item
• A and S - Cycle items left/right

Credits:

Uses skyfloogle's GMSched extension for compatibility with certain newer windows PCs. 

The palette enforcer shader used in the game is adapted from the one used in the 1.9 version of Megamix Engine. 

Palette used: Punolite Plus Remake by Punoli