I’ve been making weekly games to bolster my narrative design portfolio while learning the quirks of Godot 4, and this week’s was an interactive fiction piece in Godot 4 using inkle’s Ink markup language and paulloz’s godot-ink interpreter. My goal here was simple: Figure out how to use ink with the latest version of Godot.
I spent most of the development week doing just that, so while I consider the game story-complete, the presentation itself is very bare bones. I didn’t have time to implement illustrative graphics, music, saving, or an undo/rollback function. Or, to be truthful, more than one proofreading pass.
But it’s done. Give it a go. It’s a choice-based game about time-loops, regret, and good enough being good enough.
Content Warning: Graphic violence.
Future Development
Given sufficient interest I could:
Triple the amount of story
Do a few revision passes
Implement pixel art visuals
Add a satisfying clicky sound when options are selected
Add a save game feature
So if you like the game, let me know what you think, write a review, support me on patreon, etc.
A huge current downside to Godot 4’s Mono build (the one you need to use C#) is that you can’t export games for HTML. Yet. And the Godot plugin I’ve used requires it. So, Repeat : Return : Revise is only available on itch.io as a downloadable for Windows. And that sucks, because a lot of people will visit the page but not download anything, even if it’s free.
However, the Ink file I used to write the story can be exported in a web-playable format. So that’s exactly what I’ve done, adding that to the game’s page. The ink file alone isn’t the project, but hey, if it gets people to actually play the game, I won’t complain.
As an added quality of life improvement you CAN save your progress in the Ink version. So that’s nice.
This also means that until the Godot 4 Mono build implements html 5 exports I won’t be able to release web-versions of Godot games that incorporate ink in smaller ways. C’est la vie.
I sacrificed myself twice, was a selfish bastard once, and then reached the best ending.
I played the EXE first and then tried the Ink version online, because I wanted the ability to save. Am I missing anything by playing that version?
The story’s great, gripping stuff. I liked the protagonist’s naturalistic experience of timeloops (“You’d chalk it up to the idyllic timelessness of the season, to forgetting what day it was, to routine”) and the wrinkle that restarting a loop doesn’t heal you. Happy Death Day did something kind of similar, but the protagonist would still come back alive to the start of the loop after dying.
It was really cool when you introduced the thing in the subway tunnel, and Otherspace. Usually these kinds of stories have time looping as their only supernatural element, so I really wasn’t expecting anything like that.
One thing did confuse me though. After finding the floodlights in the corner of the maintenance room, I clicked “This could be it” to continue, but no additional story text appeared – instead, the Wait link appeared again, and I got the passage where Hamilton informs you everyone’s dead again. I was still able to continue and bring the flood lights down on the next loop though, so it feels like this could have been intentional? I think some extra story text to bridge the discovery of the light and restarting the loop would make this feel less like a bug.
The only difference between versions (aside from saving) is the layout and presentation. Thanks a lot for your feedback, especially about the bit after the lights.