Follow Lily Grapes and Gordon Bacon, special investigators, on an adventure to restore time to its proper order. Or, at least, try to.

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This is my entry for the Narrative Driven Jam #11. The theme this time was “Anachronism”. I also used the optional themes of “Besties” and “Deus Ex Machina”, somehow.

To be honest, i was more excited for the “Besties” theme because i had these two characters “in the pipeline” for almost three years, now, and i saw this as my chance to finally bring them to life.

This time i tried to stay away from the line-art style of my previously two entries in the narrative-driven jam. I actually wanted to draw something using only plain-filled shapes, much like Once Upon the Jester does.

Alas, i am not an artist and could not do anything that “pops” without outlines. And even with that is not very good.

Like always, i had to rush things in order to reach the deadline, so the game has a lot less content than i initially planned, but at i think it is entertaining nonetheless. Even if only for five minutes.

Controls

Everything is done with the mouse. This time i use different cursors to show you what you can do with all the items and characters on screen.

Assets

Fonts

Music

Comments

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(1 edit)

Some small remarks as I play through the game! :)

    1. I think you are being a bit harsh with yourself about the graphics, I like the style. Then again, I am not a graphic artist either. X)
    2. Wow, Bacon is a bit crude ("f*ck" and so on) (sorry for the egregious involuntary pun! XD)! (How surprising is it that a vegetarian would criticise Bacon rather than Grapes?) I think the writing in Detective Horse managed to be super funny while staying polite, which is closer to my taste. It may depend on the personality of the character, after all, but some ‘visual bipping’ (eg "f*ck") could still work. ;)
    3. Ceci n’est pas un T-800.’ -> Do you speak French by any chance? I am French. :) (But dislike ‘contemporary art’. XD)
    4. The Terminator-Titanic scene is one of those references I like. X) By the way, the story reminds me a bit of the French comic book Une peau de banane dans le temps (from Time Is Money), where the protagonists go back in time to meet Mona Lisa and fiddle with the famous painting.
    5. Music may be a bit loud sometimes? Some option to adjust it would be nice. (I understand this was certainly not a priority in the course of the game jam. X) Haha, right after writing this, stumbling upon meta-humour related to the deadline! XD I really love your sense of humour.)
    6. ‘Pomme’: French yet again!
    7. And French lines! XD By a stroke of luck, I can help you a lot with these.
      * ‘quelle belle raisin’ -> rather ‘quel beau raisin’ since raisin is masculine, although I guess you could argue that the gender agrees to Lily Grapes’s sex as female through syllepsis.
      * ‘Mon Dieux!’ -> ‘Mon Dieu !’, since this is singular. Also, note than in France’s French typography, there is a space before double-component punctuation marks (this is not true for all varieties of French, especially in Quebec French).
      * ‘Ceci n’est pas une raisin.’ -> same as first remark: probably ‘un raisin’, or even ‘du raisin’ considering it as partitive.
    8. That ‘earth apple’ pun is nice (pomme de terre), but I am wondering how much of the non-native-French-speaking audience can get it, since I am biased in knowledge. ;)

    Takeaway: I think you really have a talent for humourous stories. As a matter of interest, I have very recently taken a look at some ‘interactive fiction’ game jams (such as the — French! — ‘Concours de Fiction Interactive Francophone’, ‘SeedComp!’, or French ‘Partim 500’); I see yours is an entry to Narrative Driven Jam, so you could definitely specialize in narration (if you wish so, which I do not know!), or team up with other people for various game jams or projects and help with the narrative/story side in particular.

    It was a pleasant (little) moment, thank you for it. :)

    Hello!

    Thank you for your comment! Sorry to reply so late.

        I think you are being a bit harsh with yourself about the graphics, I like the style. Then again, I am not a graphic artist either. X)

    I tend to whine a lot, so it could be that they are OK.  It’s just that i want to do a lot better, and i am very frustrated that i can not, so i vented a little here.


     Wow, Bacon is a bit crude ("f*ck" and so on) (sorry for the egregious involuntary pun! XD)! (How surprising is it that a vegetarian would criticise Bacon rather than Grapes?) I think the writing in Detective Horse managed to be super funny while staying polite, which is closer to my taste. It may depend on the personality of the character, after all, but some ‘visual bipping’ (eg "f*ck") could still work. ;)

    When i wrote that line i actually stopped and thought that people might have the exact issue that you are raising here, but then i convinced myself that if there is not an excess of swear words it would possibly be OK.   Apparently, it is not, and thank you for telling me so, because i might unnecessarily alienate players with it.

    I do not like these “visual bipping” things; either you do or you do not, and adding these symbols and such is like saying “i want to, but i am too afraid” or something on that line.

    Next time i will try to follow more the innuendo route that i took for Detective Horse, which is funnier to write anyway.

        ‘Ceci n’est pas un T-800.’ -> Do you speak French by any chance? I am French. :) (But dislike ‘contemporary art’. XD)

    I live next to France and, at the time, it was common for school children to learn French as second language, so i have some notion of it, but by no stretch stretch of the imagination i would say that i “speak French”.  Read it slowly and maybe write it a bit, but that’s all.


        Music may be a bit loud sometimes? Some option to adjust it would be nice. (I understand this was certainly not a priority in the course of the game jam. X)

    No, it was not a priority, but i will take it into consideration for next time.

        * ‘quelle belle raisin’ -> rather ‘quel beau raisin’ since raisin is masculine, although I guess you could argue that the gender agrees to Lily Grapes’s sex as female through syllepsis.

    It is the same in my mother tongue (un raïm, masculine), but i had to choose to break the rules somewhere, either by using a masculine sentence to refer a female character or to “change raisin’s gender”, as it were.  I chose the latter.

    If someone else complains, i will argue that the French in a world where fruits and pigs talk and travel through time is a bit different than the one in our world 😉.

    * ‘Mon Dieux!’ -> ‘Mon Dieu !’, since this is singular.

    Fixed. Thank you!


     Also, note than in France’s French typography, there is a space before double-component punctuation marks (this is not true for all varieties of French, especially in Quebec French).

    Although i knew it, i did not have it in mind while writing these sentences. And i am a bit on the fence in this, because it would be the only sentence in an English work using French typography, which it would be correct, but i fear it would seem more an error than anything else.

    I think the even more correct way would be to put these words in italics, to show that are “foreign words”, and keep the English typography, something i wish i could have done in the sentence that Pomme says “Le pain!”, because i am mixing both languages here, but, unfortunately, the font i am using does not have an italic version.

        That ‘earth apple’ pun is nice (pomme de terre), but I am wondering how much of the non-native-French-speaking audience can get it, since I am biased in knowledge. ;)

    You got me there!  Since i am used that everyone around me knows that this is how the French people say potato, i assumed it was more common knowledge that it may be.

    To be honest, i was a more worried that people would have more trouble with the raisin / raisin misunderstanding between Pomme and Grapes than the ”earth apple” thing.


    Thank you a lot for you comments, and for playing my very short game (again)!

    Despite the shortness of the game it super fun and entertaining to play! Got a few good laughs out of me.

    Thank you, a lot, for playing! I am glad you found it fun!