Time To Live News

Deciding what to order for a long weekend is a big deal. If you have a roommate, it's even harder if they don't have the same tastes as you. Why not order for both of them? What if you can't afford it? After all, it's more efficient to have one menu.

The food ordering battle is something you can do every weekend. Before, there was nothing to do on the weekends except work part-time, come home and relax(if it wasn't raining), but now you can order delivery. This helps her manage her stress and likability. Of course, you can choose not to, and there's no penalty - it's your choice.

If you like the same food as her, you can order delivery and be done with it, but if you have different tastes, you'll have to fight for it. I've implemented this system like a card game, and this is the minigame going to introduce.


The first important thing is to choose your food, which you can do by clicking on the food pictures on the flyer. There are 7 foods: Jajangmyeon, Jjampong, Tteokbokki, Hamburger, Pizza, Sushi, Salad, and Jokbal.


Each food has eight different cards.

The cards are categorized into six attributes: taste, quantity, value, time, health, and fancy.

'Taste' is a kind of wild card, which can beat any attribute. The rest of the attributes have a recursive relationship: amount -> fancy -> health -> time -> cheap -> amount.



Observe what food she chooses, predict what attributes it has, and play your card!

If you win, you get to eat the delivery of your choice. If you lose, you'll have to order the delivery she wants. Good luck!

(Food ordering battle is not included in the demo version)

Recently identified and fixed a bug that prevented multiple save files from working independently (e.g., if a product list was modified in save A, it would be reflected in save B), but this changed the way the files are read, causing existing save files to lose the product list in the shop.

This is unavoidable, in this case I recommend restarting the game. I apologize for the inconvenience.

One of Time To Live's biggest selling points is its 16-color graphics.

16-color is a essence of the classic IBM PC games. My personal goal is to recreate the graphics of the EGA. The color table consists of eight basic colors, eight brighter colors, and 16 colors in total. These 16 colors are very sufficient for drawing, and I believe that having this constraint pushes human creativity even further, because it forces us to use our brains to overcome scarce resources.



Drawing in 16 colors is a technique that's been perfected by many before me, so it's a simple matter of following suit. There are classic games like Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and so many more.

In the beginning, I was thought, “Just draw a picture and modify it with a indexed 16 colors.” but I soon learned that this was a grave mistake. Index colors don't translate as well as I thought they would. For example, here's an example of my failure.



The figure on the left was dithered too much, which made it look quite ugly. The dithering pattern is also not uniform, so I drew it again. On the right is how it will look in the actual game.



The biggest problem is that the lines are inconsistent in thickness - I want them to be clean, one-pixel lines, but the program is too dumb, you know.

Eventually, I decided to throw away these failed drafts and start drawing it myself.

Here's how I drew them in 16 colors.



Let's start with photography. I usually travel to different places and take pictures of impressive views, which are very helpful when I'm creating something. I'll use this photo as a reference.



Start with a rough sketch. For reference, all of the background pictures have a resolution of 475 x 275 (actually 950 x 550 by 2x). I'm assuming that Time To Live will have a resolution of 640 x 360 (again, this is actually 1280 x 720 by 2x).



I drew the pixels roughly based on my sketch. Pixels should only be drawn with a mouse. If you draw with a tablet, the pixels will clump together, you won't get uniformly thick lines, and the result will be ugly.



Draw the trees to be dense.



These leaves are not hand drawn, but I created a pattern of these shapes, which I then duplicated.



You might be wondering why the color of the leaves is dark blue + dark green. Personally, I think the light green+dark green color combination is too bland, and it's a very obvious leaf color, and the outlines don't stand out. Real life leaves don't look that light green, either. Anyway, that's why I don't use light green very often.



I flipped it over and drew the leaves on the other side, then cleaned them up a bit. Then I drew the background mountain, the water, and the bridge in the distance. Since I have a limited number of colors, it's all about how much natural dithering I can add. For this reason, I often change the pattern and color of the dither as I draw. I save my dithering patterns as patterns in Photoshop.



I drew the overpass in the background. I really wanted to draw an overpass. One of the things I personally look for in art is how Korean it is, because when you go to the countryside in Korea, you always see overpasses. I want to recreate the scenery that I see around me. At the BIC exhibition, someone once asked me, “Isn't the background too Korean?” but that was my intention. The game is set in Korea, not some faraway country or other world.



This is the finalized look. I adjusted the dithering pattern of the sky to change the color a bit.



Since the game will have different backgrounds depending on the weather, we'll just change the color and dither pattern to represent a cloudy day. When I'm done, I convert it to the index color and save it, just in case. This will correct any small pixels that I didn't catch that are outside the 16 colors.



This is what it actually looks like in-game.

So there you have it, the process of creating a 16-color background illustration, and I hope you like it, whether you've played the game from this era or are seeing it for the first time.

Thank you.

If you have a TV and a game console, you can do a special activity with her. Playing games with her will increase her liking and help her manage her stress. Of course... if you win too much, it will backfire and increase her stress, so it's best to lose in moderation.



There are two games you can play.

[h2]Gomoku[/h2]



A two-player game. You start with the white stone and she with the black stone. Note that she's not very good at Gomoku.



For those unfamiliar with the rules of Gomoku, it's a game similar to tic-tac-toe. Players take turns placing their stones on the board and the first player to get 4 or 5 stones in a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal alignment wins. Find the rules to learn more

[h2]Planet Eater[/h2]



Planet Eater is a snake-style game. You play as a Giant Planet Eater and grow by eating the stars on the screen. However, you're limited by an increasingly narrowing field, so you'll need to eat as many planets as you can within the time limit to score points.

Planet Eater is for one player, but you can also play with her. In that case, she plays first and you play second. If you score more points than she does, you win.


Depending on the outcome of the game, her stress and likability goes up or down. If you win, her stress goes up. If you lost, her stress goes down. However, she doesn't like it when you lose too easily, so you'll want to win or lose in moderation.

I'm going to talk briefly about a system I've recently added or modified in-game that I've been working on





Originally, the far left of the status window showed a receipt for the furniture you bought at the recycling center, but now that receipt only appears at the beginning of the day, after that, you see a calendar.



There are 30 days in the calendar, and each day's ledger is recorded for that day.



Click on a day in the calendar to see your household ledger for that day. Since income only happens in very limited instances, most of it is expenses. Think about the fixed expenses that go out every day, look at your bankbook, and be intentional about spending them! Because if your funds go to zero, it's game over.




A healthy fish tank


Not-so-healthy fish tank

The fish tank was originally a decorative piece of furniture with no function, but with the addition of a new system, it has been transformed into a place to house and care for ornamental fish. A well-maintained fish tank adds to the comfort level of a home. But it's not essential, and if it's not maintained, it can get dirty and reduce the comfort level.

'Comfort' is a newly added system that is set based on the overall state of the room. If the comfort level is high, she will feel less stressed, and vice versa if it is low.



I'm still working on it, so stay tuned for June when I'll be able to release a demo.

That's all, folks!