A game by baroquedub for the MessyCoder's Summer GameJam 2025

Step into a world of looping days and ever-shifting stories in Time's Labyrinth, a narrative adventure where every conversation reshapes reality. As you explore beautifully rendered scenes, you choose who to speak with, each morning, unlocking new branches of dialogue, forging trust, gaining insight, and testing your resolve. Your choices carry over through a concise memory system that evolves with each exchange, leading to multiple possible endings based on your emotional bonds and discoveries.

Behind the scenes, Time's Labyrinth harnesses cutting-edge AI to bring characters to life. Every line you speak is processed by an embedded, local language model that powers dynamic, unscripted chat. Dive into a story that’s never the same twice, where AI-driven visuals and conversations make each playthrough a fresh and unforgettable journey.

About AI use in this project:

NPC Portraits and background images were AI generated using Stable Diffusion (using the pixel-art-xl model and lora:pixel_art_style_1_1 lora)

Story generation was done by generating multiple json files from a template I gave the LLM. I'd hoped to generate these on the fly and make the game entirely procedural but the speed and inconsistency of the results meant that I had resort to a set of 50 pre-crafted stories, each with a set of characters and initial interactions. If you choose to continue speaking with any of the character, the local NobodyWho LLM (using a qwen2.5-1.5b-instruct-q8_0.gguf model) then handles these responses on the fly, enabling endless exploration of each character's story arch. A system memory is enabled so that each NPC remembers what you have told it, to give context to its responses.

I'm enthralled by the dreamlike, sometimes surreal quality of generative AI art and wanted to highten and play to this mood in this game. I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I did making it.

Made with Unity

Assets used:

• 2D Pixel Quest Vol.3
• Text Animator
• DoTween Pro

• NobodyWho (Local LLM for Unity and Godot)
  https://github.com/nobodywho-ooo/nobodywho
• UIOutliner 
  https://github.com/PandaArcade/UIOutline

Editor tools:

• Odin Inspector
• QuickNav
• PlayModeSave

Music by Cathran (Album: Chilled Electronic Music)

With Thanks:

Hour Glass by https://davitheoles.itch.io/inverted-hourglass