Time Undone Brainstorming
From WorkCDN
Contents |
Selling Points
Utilize time travel as a way to fully explore an engaging story. Solve new type of puzzles based on the time and alternate universe mechanics. Adventure game style is approachable to a wide audience.
Fun Factors
- An engaging story that involves a good amount of drama, mystery, and sci-fi.
- Because the story involves time travel, the narrative does not need to be broken by typical resets, like your own death. Upon death, the time mechanic will simply rewind the player to the start as a natural story element. This keeps the story more immersive.
- Additionally, the story can include some gripping dramatic elements (such as the death of main characters), but still resolve with them being alive at the end due to changing the past.
- Take control of time with a dynamically generated "story tree" that allows you to see all the story branches you've traversed, how they're connected, and freely re-enter game play at any point.
- Original "rewind" mechanic allows you to solve puzzles in new ways.
- Put yourself at the right place and time to learn what you need to, to solve puzzles in the past. For instance, if you need a code to a door, you may have to fast forward to when the NPC who knows is around, ask for the code, then rewind to where you started and enter the code.
- Seek out the right dialog path without having NPC's who answer your every question.
- Additional mechanic later on of item swapping across branches allows for the capacity to transfer changes between threads, allowing for more puzzle solving.
- Maybe a "Find what's different" mechanic when you get thrown into a branch you haven't previously navigated, and have to solve the root cause of what made the branch to properly "attach" it.
- Standard adventure game type puzzles as well.
- Story contains several “ah-ha” moments.
- The first realization that you’re not dead, and you get to replay through the drama your own way.
- The realization that you can navigate freely through time.
- Creating your first time branch.
- Unwinding the ball of causality that caused the final disaster. Thinking this will be caused not by some "evil" bad guy, but rather by multiple little acts of selfishness preformed by many characters.
- Realizing your part in all that has occurred.
- The surprise when elements you thought were static change.
- The recognition of your personal sacrifice that must be made to avoid the disaster.
Key Mechanics / Features
You are stuck in a time loop, which causes your character to reset when a time device malfunctions and causes a disruption at the "end" of the core story. Your character however retains his memories in the reset, while others do not. As you replay the segment, you can make new choices which create new branches on the "story tree". As part of the interface, you will have access to freely navigate and jump to points in this tree. The time loop only resets a certain distance in the past. As a plot device, you will need to expand the power of the disruption so that you are hurled further into the past (giving you access to new choices). You'll likely need to do this several times to get all the way back to where you can do the complete solution.
Brainstorming
the player can control, by means of point and click objects in the environment a single player
the Time Map has static and dynamic elements the trunk is the unalterable main story the branches and sub-branches are pre-determined the twigs and leaves are dynamically generated perhaps a Spider Graph is the best graphical representation of the Time Map
the ai follows the same hierarchical principal as the Time Map each character has: an end goal the end goal is broken down into scene objectives each objective has thoughts, which are translated into actions the actions are represented in a series of animations the animations have frames goals, scene objectives, thoughts/actions, and animations are relational to trunk, branches, twigs, leaves
the player can interact directly at the action level and indirectly affect the scene objectives, and the current animation clicking on a door causes the character to turn, walk, stop, grab doorknob, open door, exit each one of these is an animation, which is interruptible so clicking on the door might cause turn, walk, stop, grab doorknob and then clicking on the other side of the room at that moment causes release doorknob, turn, walk, stop dynamically controlling the character is similar to leaf, twig, branch since it's not an action game, the player cannot interrupt the character at the frame level the players interaction determines which (if any) characters achieve their scene objective this alters the available scene objectives for any next scenes the player usually cannot change the goal of the character, or can in a limited capacity when it makes sense for the story bittersweet ending -- the character finishes his character arch, but doesn't get his/her goal Maltese falcon -- the goal is just a decoy for what really going on in the story
a first iteration of the game will be a tool which echoes/traces the ai to the screen instead of clickable graphics, it has clickable buttons, one for each object. (sample attached)
