The Subtle Hourglass

How to Play

You will have a goal and an arrow pointing to it. Do that thing! Fight monsters along the way. Careful, you only have 60 seconds before the hourglass kills you! When you die, your previous playthrough becomes a clone that can help or hinder you.

• Arrows or WASD: Move around
• Space: Attack
• Shift: Defend
• Delete (backspace): Rewind time and make a clone
• Hold R: Restart the game
• Hold Esc: Quit the game

As you collect goals, you will get powerups, although I didn’t have time to add feedback telling you what they are in-game.

• Dragon’s Blood: +1 health
• Adamantite Ore: +1 damage
• Bones of Prisoners: Ethereal; pass through clones and enemies
• Kill 20 enemies: Speed increase

Story

Your home is under attack by monsters! It would be inevitable that they would kill you and your siblings, except your family has the Subtle Hourglass! You’ve long been warned never to use the thing, as the moment you touch it, you will have only 60 seconds to live! Once you die, it will reverse time and create a time echo of your past exploits, forcing you to relive the same 60 seconds over and over again.

Use the power of the Subtle Hourglass to rescue your 2 siblings, and then gather the ingredients needed to destroy it! All within 60 seconds…

Development notes

Made in Unity, art done in Aseprite, audio in Amadeus Pro.

This was a fun one to make, I’ve had this sort of idea for awhile but of course it changed a bit during development. I basically wanted to combine aspects of Snake (kill yourself but running into yourself), Overcooked (flooded chokepoints), and Minit (limited time before death). The Snake part definitely fell away, but I really enjoyed the genuine humor you get from all your little ghosts getting in your way.

If I had more time, I would make the overall feedback and level design better, and would probably add some way to kill your ghosts off. As it stands, if you play too long things basically become impossible.

I haven’t made my own art in awhile. Holy crap that takes a long time (I spent half the 48h on art)! I decided to use some art I already had as reference and then basically re-painted all of it in aseprite with modifications and added a whole lot more. I find starting with a reference makes it much easier to produce the volume of art I needed for this one.

Thanks for playing!