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[ArmchairArmada]

Ok guys.  I came up with an awesome game idea, but I have no idea how EXACTLY I will be able to pull it off.  Basically it's a game where the cockpit is a time machine.  I have been thinking I might try to create a civilization simulation that keeps track of all the historical events up to the current point in time.  Changes you make in history will alter the future of that civilization.  Go back in time, change something, go forwards in time and everything is different ... this might be complex, but I haven't been this excited about an idea for a while.

The major problem, however, is that I don't really know what the goal might be or what exactly would be the gameplay mechanics.  What is the player working towards?  What actions can the player take to alter history?  I don't know, but I would love it if some of you might help me figure it out.

[Inanimate]

Maybe make it that you are trying to save your wife, a la the Time Machine? But after screwing everything up, you just try fixing it back to normal? Maybe make it IMPOSSIBLE to win, and just be a fun game to tinker around with?

[ElTipejoLoco]

I suggest researching the plots and game mechanics of the games Time Gal and Shadow of Memories (also known as Shadow of Destiny), if you need additional inspiration.

If you're looking for design ideas for the machine itself, you could always (believe it or not) look at Mario's Time Machine's... time machine. It's oddly iconic and I think had a bunch of useless levers and thingamabobs that you could try to put together to make a complex and silly looking time machine. It's not so much to confuse the player as to make it seem iconic and easily recognizable to them, y'know?

... anyway, g'luck! Sounds awesome.

[gunswordfist]

Ok guys.  I came up with an awesome game idea, but I have no idea how EXACTLY I will be able to pull it off.  Basically it's a game where the cockpit is a time machine.  I have been thinking I might try to create a civilization simulation that keeps track of all the historical events up to the current point in time.  Changes you make in history will alter the future of that civilization.  Go back in time, change something, go forwards in time and everything is different ... this might be complex, but I haven't been this excited about an idea for a while.

The major problem, however, is that I don't really know what the goal might be or what exactly would be the gameplay mechanics.  What is the player working towards?  What actions can the player take to alter history?  I don't know, but I would love it if some of you might help me figure it out.

Being able to do a Time Travel game would be pretty much the ultimate accomplish for me. The first reason is because doing a Time Travel game would be a dream come true because the game would be sucj an epic, magical journey The second because when I say ultimate, I really mean 'damn near impossible' okay not impossible because I hear Chrono Trigger did it and the best handheld game of all time, Astro Boy Omega Factor did it. But to do it the way I or you want to do it would be very hard. There's so much to it I don't even know where to begin. Just go in knowing that and see what you can do.

[Traveller]

Hmmm.  Have you ever played the flash game "Grow", where you have like 12 items to drop onto a sphere, and previously-dropped parts evolve based on the current state of the board?  You could use that kind of system for a time travel game.  If (gunpowder exists) and (war level 1), then (war gains a level)...

[ArmchairArmada]

I thought about it some, and I thought that the basic story behind the game could be that there are time terrorists going to the past trying to destroy civilization.  It is your job to hunt them down and prevent them from causing serious damage -- not necessarily prevent history from changing (as small changes can have a large impact), but instead to keep the human race from going extinct.

Any matter existing outside the stream of time (such as a time machine) is immune to the effects of altering history.  Preventing these temporal criminals from being born would have no effect on these people, since they have already left the time line.

The play control could be similar to Descent, though simplified since there would be no need to fly upside down.  I would like to have gameplay that is deeper than flying and shooting, though -- I'm just not sure in what way.

As far as the simulation is concerned, obviously I cannot have a too fine grain resolution to it.  I cannot simulate the daily lives of individual people, as a city may have well over a million at any given moment.  Instead, however, I can influence the statistical probabilities of events occurring along with low resolution data grids.

The data grids are somewhat low resolution maps of data describing the area at a given time.  Some data grids may include land value, wealth, population, food, water, health, emotional states (happy, content, agitated, enraged, etc.), crime, etc.  The data grids will likely update at a frequency of once per quarter year.

The probabilities of events occurring depend upon this data and the data, in turn, will be influenced by events.  For example a drought may kill crops which causes food to be limited and an area may sink into an economic slump which causes the emotional state of the area to become upset which causes crime rates to rise which causes murders, fires, property damage, civil war, etc.

All of these, however, may not be fully appreciated if all the player is doing is flying around shooting enemies, so I'm going to have to come up with a way to deepen the gameplay.  I want the effects the player and enemies have on the environment to be easily identifiable.  I suppose being able to fast forward and rewind history could provide the player to see the rise and fall of buildings and even whole cities.  Still, there would be a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes.  In that case, it may be best to try to keep things as simple as possible and not get too carried away with how many different data sets should be kept track of.

[mirosurabu]

Funny how almost every idea I come up with for this competition gets at least one topic. I wish you pull this off. 

This will be the best competition evAr!

[muku]

@ArmchairArmada: Great concept, it sounds quite ambitious. If you haven't yet, I suggest you take a look at increpare's Omnia Opera, I think some of his simulation concepts are quite relevant for what you are trying to do. Also, the completely nonviolent gameplay may be an inspiration... In other words: if you think just flying around and shooting is too shallow, get rid of the shooting entirely.

[diaskeaus]

Sounds a bit like the Journeyman Project, which was an awesome game, btw.  Very old school, but a sweet ride for the time.

[Titch]

Hmmm.  Have you ever played the flash game "Grow", where you have like 12 items to drop onto a sphere, and previously-dropped parts evolve based on the current state of the board?  You could use that kind of system for a time travel game.  If (gunpowder exists) and (war level 1), then (war gains a level)...

The guy who did Grow did another game which did involve time travel of a sort (you could move to different times within the same day and had to jump backwards and fowards in order to solve puzzles) it was called Chronon or something like that...

[TooMuchSpareTime]

As an open-ended stategy game, the scope of this would be epic! If it's a single story-thread driven game, that also has equally great potential. Your explanation of paradox-free history alteration is nice, and suggests that in order to stop the terrorists, you may have to alter history in some way to allow a currently theoretical technology to arise for you to wield against the terrorists and then put the timeline back to "normal"... Which would cause even more problems...  OMG, maybe the "terrorist" is actually YOU from an alternate timeline, trying to stop who HE thinks is the terrorist (which is you, because you're also altering the timeline in order to stop him from altering it)! And as long as the future outcome of your (and your double's) tampering is yet to be decided, you can both exist in the same timeline.
 It seems to make sense if you don't think about it too hard. I love time travel craziness.  :D (I don't think you're going for "Day of the Tentacle" silliness though?)

Here's an idea for a title: "Temporal Tampering"   

(I don't mean to override your own ideas, I was just inspired by your concept.  )

[ArmchairArmada]

Thanks for the comments.  I was thinking about the possibility of the time terrorist being you from your own future, but I wasn't sure if that would be a little too predictable.  I may keep it open as a possibility.

I talked to my brother about this competition, and he came up with a lot of interesting and humorous game ideas.  Some of his ideas were so interesting that I'm not entirely certain if I actually will make this time traveling game ... though I know I would like to try to make it.

In some ways I was thinking time traveling would have to be presented in more of a sandbox style game, as the many alterations to the history of the area would make it difficult for a player to feel the same connection as if (s)he had built up the civilization manually.  Progress would be, for the most part, automatic, so it would also be difficult to formulate clear strategies.  In that way having more direct interactions with the time terrorist would be easier to play.

I may just have to start experimenting with creating a civilization simulation and see what happens from there.  Maybe having something to play around with might give me a better idea of how to make it into some sort of game.

[nunix]

Um.. Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? is the first thing that comes to mind.

[ArmchairArmada]

I'm beginning to think that I might have to go with a different idea than time traveling through a simulated civilization.  I was listing out all the factors that might contribute to the development of a civilization and how these factors are related to each other when I began to think about how difficult it would be to balance these factors.  They are all interdependent upon each other, so changes in the value of one factor might throw off other factors.  Attempts to balance out these values would most likely result in either the rapid collapse of the civilization, rapid growth of the civilization, or, most likely, an extreme off balance of factors causing unpredictable results -- for example having an over abundance of money while at the same time people are dying of starvation because they are not buying enough food from neighboring areas.

I may need to experiment with some sort of adaptive system that can effectively compensate for imbalances or consider alternative game ideas -- the latter may be easier.

[gunswordfist]

I'm beginning to think that I might have to go with a different idea than time traveling through a simulated civilization.  I was listing out all the factors that might contribute to the development of a civilization and how these factors are related to each other when I began to think about how difficult it would be to balance these factors.  They are all interdependent upon each other, so changes in the value of one factor might throw off other factors.  Attempts to balance out these values would most likely result in either the rapid collapse of the civilization, rapid growth of the civilization, or, most likely, an extreme off balance of factors causing unpredictable results -- for example having an over abundance of money while at the same time people are dying of starvation because they are not buying enough food from neighboring areas.

I may need to experiment with some sort of adaptive system that can effectively compensate for imbalances or consider alternative game ideas -- the latter may be easier.

Yeah making a time travel game won't be easy at all but see what you can do anyway.

[increpare]

i think it'll be definitely doable.  it'll be good to see what you come up with.

[Pishtaco]

I was on the tram the other day, and was thinking about games that you could play from the driving seat of one. One idea I had (but am not going to make myself) was "Time Tram", which was partly inspired by a picture I saw of a horse-drawn tram in my city in the 19th century.

You are driving a tram around a city, picking up and delivering passengers. The city is drawn in 3d in some stylized way; typically a lot of grey blocks, with some shimmering tram-tracks threading through them. You can go backwards and forwards, mess with the points, possibly have some choice about how the track in front of you is laid out, and, in some fashion, travel in time. I imagined that the game would start off with small hops in time, which you would use to make sure that you weren't late in delivering your passengers where they wanted to go. But somehow you end up making bigger jumps, and this has an effect on the city. Naturally when you go to the past the buildings look different (brown or red instead of grey), and maybe the things you do will make the present buildings look different too, with different heights, a different layout of tracks, and maybe a hospital here where there used to be a school. Perhaps these are consequences of delivering teams of builders into the past rather than to their requested stop. It would be more of a puzzle game than an adventure. That's as far as I got in thinking about it.

[nayon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_Memories


Best time-travel game ever, imo. Not counting the Princes. Great adventure game with original plot.

[moi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_Memories


Best time-travel game ever, imo. Not counting the Princes. Great adventure game with original plot.

Played it, interesting story, but it was mostly a walk simulator.Slowwwww walk.

[ElTipejoLoco]

I suggest researching the plots and game mechanics of the games Time Gal and Shadow of Memories (also known as Shadow of Destiny), if you need additional inspiration.

If you're looking for design ideas for the machine itself, you could always (believe it or not) look at Mario's Time Machine's... time machine. It's oddly iconic and I think had a bunch of useless levers and thingamabobs that you could try to put together to make a complex and silly looking time machine. It's not so much to confuse the player as to make it seem iconic and easily recognizable to them, y'know?

... anyway, g'luck! Sounds awesome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_of_Memories


Best time-travel game ever, imo. Not counting the Princes. Great adventure game with original plot.

That's two for Shadow of Memories. Go forth and research!