Project Temporality time bending third person puzzler for PC
Posted: 07 Jul 2013, 16:28
Hello everybody,
To keep this simple for everyone I will write this in English because unless you can read Swedish a lot easier than I can read danish this will be the easiest way for all included. First of all I want to thank Jonas for inviting us all to this forum, I to believe there would be much to gain from viewing the Nordic game industry as a large community instead of several separate ones.
So with that our of the way I want to share what we at DefrostGames (http://www.Defrostgames.com) has been working on for the last 3 years, a third persn action/puzzle game build around time-manipulation you can think of it like a first person puzzler but in third person instead because we believe that works better for platform elements) Since we don't have any income from this we are either doing this in our free time or doing other works part time to support our indie dream.
So far it has gone pretty well and we are proud of what we have achieved, we still feel our game is very different to the clones of it that has appeared after our first trailer release.
Project Temporality is all about being time to your advantage and solve puzzles that just weren't possible before. We have come to start calling this single-player cooperation but it's so much more than that, You aren't just creating clones that can help you, instead time is just a dimension for you to traverse as free and flexible as the other 3 you can move seamlessly back and forward and select that exact moment you want to spawn of a different time-line or just return to normal controls. of course some objects resists this and are protected by what we call a Temporality field which creates all kind of mayhem for you.
Making this game has been a huge undertaking as we had to create the tech and engine for ourselves from scratch as no existing middle-ware engine supports seamlessly moving forward and backward through time with effects/particles/animations etc updating which is probably the reason why games like tessalation don't allow you to move backwards in time but instead settle for letting you return to a known point without showing it or giving you control. We wanted more than that we wanted total control but in 3D so we had to make it our self.
This screenshot from the game shows a bit of it in action with a middle level puzzle with platforms,mirrors,laser button and keys all mixed together in a small space. A key design decision has been that we wanted to build the game around a single concept with tons of layers around it's core like a onion. and that concept is Time-lines.
The Time-line concept is central to our game-play it means that you can have multiple parallel existences virtually without limits so if you can figure out a way to do it with the games input system you can create new existences at almost any point in time and you can go to any of these points in time to see what happened.
Because total freedom made it hard to make interesting puzzle designs we had to add in some limitations, the biggest one is that there can only be one timeline that you control at the moment and it's the newest one. And only the time-line you control can spawn other time-lines, this is because we wanted to focus on puzzle solving and not juggling a huge number of parallel timelines.
In fact in actual game-play even most of the complex one stays within 3-4 timelines because we want the important part of a puzzle being figuring out how to solve it and not fighting with the game to actually perform it. So once you solved one it should be easy to do it again.
Since most of the game happens in the players mind it's kind of hard to show it properly in video shape or in written shape but we made a small trailer recently that tries to show of some of the mechanics.
For some reason the youtube tag won't work so here is a link instead,
**Admin Fixed**
qlv5whEMdNU
We hope this sounds interesting and are happy to answer any questions you might have.
We also recently launcher our indiegogo campaign (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/project-temporality which is a campaign with a slight twist we are actually looking for people who want to contribute to making the game better by having Co-Creator tiers that allows the funder to be a part of making the game, as these do take quite a bit of our time we have to charge a little higher price for them sadly.
If these seems like an interesting project please tell us or ask any questions you have, we have tried not to duplicate everything that is written everywhere else here while still give a complete picture of the game.
/Defrost Games out
To keep this simple for everyone I will write this in English because unless you can read Swedish a lot easier than I can read danish this will be the easiest way for all included. First of all I want to thank Jonas for inviting us all to this forum, I to believe there would be much to gain from viewing the Nordic game industry as a large community instead of several separate ones.
So with that our of the way I want to share what we at DefrostGames (http://www.Defrostgames.com) has been working on for the last 3 years, a third persn action/puzzle game build around time-manipulation you can think of it like a first person puzzler but in third person instead because we believe that works better for platform elements) Since we don't have any income from this we are either doing this in our free time or doing other works part time to support our indie dream.
So far it has gone pretty well and we are proud of what we have achieved, we still feel our game is very different to the clones of it that has appeared after our first trailer release.
Project Temporality is all about being time to your advantage and solve puzzles that just weren't possible before. We have come to start calling this single-player cooperation but it's so much more than that, You aren't just creating clones that can help you, instead time is just a dimension for you to traverse as free and flexible as the other 3 you can move seamlessly back and forward and select that exact moment you want to spawn of a different time-line or just return to normal controls. of course some objects resists this and are protected by what we call a Temporality field which creates all kind of mayhem for you.
Making this game has been a huge undertaking as we had to create the tech and engine for ourselves from scratch as no existing middle-ware engine supports seamlessly moving forward and backward through time with effects/particles/animations etc updating which is probably the reason why games like tessalation don't allow you to move backwards in time but instead settle for letting you return to a known point without showing it or giving you control. We wanted more than that we wanted total control but in 3D so we had to make it our self.
This screenshot from the game shows a bit of it in action with a middle level puzzle with platforms,mirrors,laser button and keys all mixed together in a small space. A key design decision has been that we wanted to build the game around a single concept with tons of layers around it's core like a onion. and that concept is Time-lines.
The Time-line concept is central to our game-play it means that you can have multiple parallel existences virtually without limits so if you can figure out a way to do it with the games input system you can create new existences at almost any point in time and you can go to any of these points in time to see what happened.
Because total freedom made it hard to make interesting puzzle designs we had to add in some limitations, the biggest one is that there can only be one timeline that you control at the moment and it's the newest one. And only the time-line you control can spawn other time-lines, this is because we wanted to focus on puzzle solving and not juggling a huge number of parallel timelines.
In fact in actual game-play even most of the complex one stays within 3-4 timelines because we want the important part of a puzzle being figuring out how to solve it and not fighting with the game to actually perform it. So once you solved one it should be easy to do it again.
Since most of the game happens in the players mind it's kind of hard to show it properly in video shape or in written shape but we made a small trailer recently that tries to show of some of the mechanics.
For some reason the youtube tag won't work so here is a link instead,
**Admin Fixed**
qlv5whEMdNU
We hope this sounds interesting and are happy to answer any questions you might have.
We also recently launcher our indiegogo campaign (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/project-temporality which is a campaign with a slight twist we are actually looking for people who want to contribute to making the game better by having Co-Creator tiers that allows the funder to be a part of making the game, as these do take quite a bit of our time we have to charge a little higher price for them sadly.
If these seems like an interesting project please tell us or ask any questions you have, we have tried not to duplicate everything that is written everywhere else here while still give a complete picture of the game.
/Defrost Games out