Design Journal - Time Traveller

Before in another journal entry I discuss the possibility of using time travel as not just an element in a game but rather as incorporated into the games mechanic and essentially making the basis for how the game is played.

The approach I would take for my game would be a single timeline and having the game mechanic where the player would not be allowed any direct interaction with them. This can be achieved through information hiding where the player cannot see or enter areas of a room where you may appear later in the game or have appeared previous. That is not to say you cant watch your own actions you just cannot see into areas that you don’t know what is there yet. This idea is what I planned to use for my casual game development.

You are an infamous genius inventor and you’ve just invented the world’s first time travel device. Having just performed this amazing feat you decide you should test it out by only travelling forwards in time 17 minutes into the future. When you awaken there in the future you find yourself alone in the room and with the self destruct about to go off, rapidly you rush over to try to turn it off only to find your password has been changed and you are about to die.

You look down to your right and see that is a cryptic note next to the keyboard in your handwriting saying “you should never have messed with time”. With moments left to go before the lab is destroyed you quickly activate the time travel device and head back to where you began.

The game features a series of puzzles that must be solved in order to continue the game. Some of the puzzles are time based meaning you must solve the puzzle using time travel and multiple iterations to do so.

The game is in the vein of a choose-your-own-adventure where the player inspires their own solutions to solving the problem. While there is a set critical path that the player must follow to win the game, there are many ways to achieve this goal and deviating in any way from the critical path may result in the user’s untimely failure.

However having said that, each time the user plays through the game and fails they are given a vital clue to how to succeed in the game for next time in the way similar to a cliff hanger. Since we are dealing with time travel, the device for time travel also features an universal unwind button allowing the user to go back to the beginning of their personal timeline and still retain their newly learned knowledge to try again.

The game would require of a new style of thinking to solve the puzzles but I have many in mind where the player can interact with themselves using specified time sequenced events. Objects in the game that must be activated before a certain time period so you know you must do, for example exploring an area at the 15^th minute mark of the universal timeline, you would find the area arranged in a specific way so then later in the game if you explore the same room at the 5^th minute and find something missing you know that of course you must find this object and put it there.