Entropy Block

Time is of the essence. When some possible future has to be prevented, robots known as Entropy Blockers are sent through complex facilities; there, they must make their way to an entropy-switching device that will send a ‘copy’ of themselves somewhere, but this copy will progress backwards in time. The goal of the Entropy Blocker is then to find its past self and destroy it, thus generating a time paradox that will wipe out the current timeline.

‘Backward copy’ concept inspired by the film Tenet.

PROTIP: use F1 to skip the current level. Made for testing purposes (and not having to set any complex system up).

Credits: music: excerpt (sometimes reversed) from Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod

/!\ WARNING: music may not work in the navigator version (this is caused by random navigator-related issues); if you do not hear music in level 1, refresh the page and relaunch the game. Music should then work.

Creation context

Made for Mini Jam 110 with theme ‘Sacrifice’ and limitation ‘Failure is Inevitable’. (Running time: from July 8th 2022 at 6:00 AM to July 11th 2022 at 6:00 AM.)

Some gameplay-related notes

• There are some subtle mechanics that may not all be apparent in the current (17) levels.
  Nevertheless, some justification for the fact that the ‘future’ robot has priority to choose a past for the lasers: my reasoning was that negative-entropy entities have more weight/influence over the past and its determination. Yes, I asked myself some deep questions to come up with the game.
• Hole-suicide (and direct wrong-button suicide) has been prevented because I feared this might cause some wrongful failures in an already rather hard game. It is also easier to check than, say, lasers (because they are less static).
• You can theoretically get in a ‘checkmate’ situation in the ‘reverted’ mode, if the robot is surrounded by forbidden buttons and possible obstacles; this is not a problem, you just have to wait until null entropy.

Some technical notes

• I have tested one desktop version and upon launching, Ct.js told me that it would not work outside of a Web browser, but it still did… So, it should work. If it does not, please tell me, or even better, if you know how to fix this in Ct.js, please tell me too.
• There were two bugs with the first publication, which turned out to have the same origin: the data cleanup after each level lacked only one mere instruction; this is now fixed.
• Fullscreen is enabled for the navigator version so that the music works. I tested it and it may happen that you do not get the music the first time; reloading the page should do the trick. Update (15/07/2022): it turns out that it works better for me without setting default fullscreen, so I turned it off; please tell me how things appear for you.