What people are saying:

“I'm in love with the fractal-polygonal painterly art style of 42 Light Years and the lasso-and-rotate puzzle mechanic seems to sneakily teach the player 2D game editing skills.” Alex Peake, Primer Labs.

"42 Light Years stood out almost immediately to me because of the captivating art style and the proposed method of puzzle solving within the game." Steve Tom Sawyer, Hard Core Gamer.

“Will we discover the meaning of life within this eerie alien world? If the rather arresting concept art didn’t strike you, what if I told you that you could solve puzzles by encasing yourself in a time-manipulation sphere so that you could evolve at turbo-speed and employ Future You’s skills right now? Yeah—42 Light Years is looking to be pretty special indeed.” Katie Williams, PC Gamer.

“Besides the central mechanic, the music and art style of the game are both ticks in the plus column. The simple block colours is eye-catching and lends the world a mythic quality...”  Julian Benson, PC Games N.

Vision

We want the player to feel like something is about to happen at every turn. As the player, you will stand on the edge between a casual, easy-going game, and a compelling mystery in the form of a matured puzzle side-scroller. 42 Light Years will definitely raise some eyebrows, and we intend for it to end up dropping jaws.

User Experience

Embark on a journey where wits will come foremost in order to overcome each challenge. Through trial and error, discover the various ways to approach a puzzle. Some will reveal themselves to be dauntingly obvious (such as letting the hours on your device’s clock go by), while some will require you to come up with a strategy the fabric of which shall be woven with some colorful ideas (ever thought of willingly fast-evolving yourself to adapt to conditions of the future, gaining skills that you will need in the past? ... yeah, we hadn’t either).

Every step taken in the game is meant to bring you closer to what 42 Light Years really means, as each link in its non-linear chain of events contains information pertaining the answer to life, the universe and... well, not everything, but quite a bit..

The game is designed to be consumed in small chunks of time. This is why its separated into levels and worlds. The idea being that the player can have fun for some minutes and make  significant progress in the game (like pass a level or two). This is only natural given that we are targeting smartphones.

The Game

42LY is a 2D, side scrolling video game. It is planned to be available in the following systems: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, iOS and Android. Our funding goal will allow us to create three worlds with various levels each. 

We plan to dedicate around 24 weeks of production to the game. We have some extended goals under our sleeves, which we plan to post if our current funding goal draws near. Some of these include expansion packs with new levels and abilities.

We will be using the awesome libGDX game dev framework, which makes it easy to support multiple platforms. We are also going to use other tools that will make the development process easier and faster.

The Team, Our story

We started with the idea of creating a video game company in Guatemala that would make games that would be played all around the world. Why video games? Cause we love to play them! The video game industry in Guatemala is just starting, and we are hoping to create hype and help make it grow. There is huge potential and great talented programmers and designers here and we want to give them an opportunity to show their potential. In 2012 we created #paniccity, with just 3 people and around 6 months of work. We learned a lot in the process and have come a long way since then. We then moved on to create Gesto, which we had a beta version up and running in less than a month (with the same 3 people). We haven’t released it yet because we are still working on the multiplayer mode, but are now doing our pre-launch campaign. Our team grew to 4 people this year, and we are hoping to keep adding more team members! 

Music for the video by: Pablo Rubio - http://reverbnation.com/bobbythinkingabby

Current Games

In Play Store                                                  About to launch

The whole game revolves around the concept of time manipulation. The main mechanism for solving the puzzles and levels will be a time controlling "sphere". You will be able to create a sphere, resize it and rotate at your will, and everything inside it will undergo time warp. The time manipulation goes beyond the sphere, and certain characteristics of the game will vary depending on the hour you play the game. This mechanism is very rich and still somewhat abstract, which leaves a lot of room for creativity in each level design. 42LY is a 2D side-scroller, with different depth levels. What excites us is to create an environment where nature and other objects can grow or deteriorate organically when taken back and forth through time. 

We decided on a 2D game style, as you can see in the pictures we have included (more to come...). We love 2D games and feel there's certain artistry to them that we would like to portray in 42LY. As you can appreciate in the concept art we have included here, the pictures are filled with geometric objects, using triangles as a structural element.

 Our hero...

Our hero (code named Quarante) wakes up in a barren territory, on an unknown planet. He knows there’s a reason for him to be there, but he can’t recall it. Setting out to survive, Quarante finds some sort of luminous life form which guides him to what will become the beginning of his adventure, providing him somewhere along the way with an artifact that has the curious capacity of manipulating time within the area of a sphere called Timeball. As he travels, Quarante will discover just how useful can it be to propel individual objects to their future or send them back a few steps in time, while meetings with unexpected deities of the land bring him closer to knowing his purpose and destiny (for better or worse, pertaining his physical and mental integrity). As the mysterious character who granted him the Timeball becomes ever familiar, Quarante will come to doubt even the soil he stands on, for it is closer to his objectives than he realizes. The soil holds a lot more than his footsteps, and there’s someone or something behind the answer to the rare presence that seems to permeate the ground.

What deep mystery rests in this place?

We want to create a game that the same players become part of the development process. The goal is to dedicate our time and resources in a game that not only our team, but also our future users will enjoy to play.

Your contributions will help us keep 42 LY original to its core idea. As we said before, our main priority (even before funding), is to get YOUR INPUT. We are a company built from the ground up with the idea that we don’t only want to create awesome games, but games that people truly want to play. That's why we see our backers as the first line of user feedback setting up priorities and even defining game features and style. 

Whatever funds we obtain will be used solely to producing this game. Even if we don’t reach our goal, we will still try to implement as much of 42 LY as possible.  

Most funds will go to paying the staff. This includes the Designers and Programmers responsible for creating awesome art, animation and gameplay for 42 Light Years. 

• Post our project in your Facebook

• Tweet the campaign link

• Talk about the game in your favorite blogs and websites.

If you want to help the project, but can’t contribute for any reason, please share our project and passion with your friends and family. You can find our Social Links below.

We have a special gift!

...for the best social promoter of 42LY Indiegogos campaign. He will get a free copy of the game plus a special desktop wallpaper. To participate, you have to create an Indiegogo account (they measure how many people come through your links). Share the project link, and whoever has a higher Referral number, wins!

For those having problems with paying, try the following out, we've heard it works. You don't need a PayPal account to pay with PayPal.

Choose "Pay with PayPal". Then press "Pay with a credit or debit card", and it will show a form to input your info.

At the bottom, make sure to check off "Save this information with a PayPal account".

Let us know if you have any troubles, and thanks for your support!