Time Travel & Dynamic Timeline

Scint · 2004-06-10T19:51:23

I''ve been kicking this idea around for a while. There have been past games or idea posts here that talk about time travel, but not in the sense that I am thinking about. Here''s my pitch: What got me thinking about this: Do you remember the Simpson''s Halloween episode where Homer invents a time travel toaster? He''d travel back to dinosaur times, and with one action -- like sneezing -- he ends up greatly changing the timeline. In this game, you essentially do just that, although on a smaller scale. Every time you travel to the future, the game would generate a new timeline from the point you left. The goal of the game, possibly, would be to create the best future you can. A possible scenario could be that your present is faced with a doomsday situation, which could have been prevented, so you invent a time machine to try to fix it. However, in trying to fix the past, you end up changing many things. This game would probably be never ending, since the player might find something he doesn''t quite like, so he goes into the past to try to change it. Doing so might have harsh consequences though. Scaling it down: You read the last two paragraphs probably think, "Whoa -- that''s way too ambitious, there are too many factors." You''re right, of course, so in order for this game to work there needs to be some constraints: 1) Most important -- you can only deal with a isolated community. For example: Your community starts out as a small colony of people making a first settlement on a new planet. 2) You can only travel in a certain (again isolated) area. Take the Back to the Future movies: they played out entirely in the same town. 3) Limit the span of time you can travel. Say, you can only travel back as far as when the colonists first landed. Possibly, you cannot travel into the future from where you first start in the game. How the timeline generation works: NPCs in town have basically a "The Sims"-like AI. As the time simulation goes, males and females "find" each other and have babies. Depending on who mates with who will affect the eventual population. Perhaps the easiest way to change the past is to assassinate somebody before he or she has children. Or, play match-maker and hook up a couple that were not originally intended for each other. The NPCs have certain statistics, such as intelligence, charisma, strength, and so on. If an NPC is smart enough, he could invent something. If charisma is high enough, he could become mayor. If he is crazy enough, he could be a murderer. These inventions, leaderships, and crimes in the simulation could greatly affect the future. To put it more simply: To travel in the future, take the current population of self-supporting NPCs, allow them to age and reproduce, and put the game speed on ultra-fast. Keep a log of what happened so that you can time travel to the past. The fun element would be to basically mess around and see what happens. A major part, as I see it, is selective breeding and assassinations. Example: A murderer kills somebody who is smart enough to invent something good. You decide to murder the murderer before he does anything. However, it ends up that the murderer''s great great great grandson was a great inventor himself. Your character could also fall in love and have children. It could also be possible to take people and objects from one time and transplant them in another. Thus, you could put all the great inventors in time all together. One of my concerns is keeping the NPCs as interesting characters. I want to be able to travel to any time and be able to find interesting people to have fun conversations with. I''d hate to have NPCs only say a bunch of canned responses. Comments? Worries about paradoxes?

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by Scint June 07, 2004 04:20 PM

11 comments, last by Scint 19 years, 10 months ago

Axiverse

367

June 10, 2004 04:25 PM

Ever heard of "Chrono Trigger" Where time travel affects things, but it''s still a good idea...

psykr

295

June 10, 2004 05:34 PM

How about only having a set amount of fuel for the time machine thing, that recharges after a while, so you can''t, say, go back in time a day, and eventually meet a hundred copies of yourself?

From a programmer''s perspective, being able to change the past sounds very computationally expensive. Every time you do something, wouldn''t you have to recompute the new state of the world at every period in the future? You can''t just compute them on the fly (continuously, in the background), since everything depends on past events, and you can''t compute them during time travel, since that may take forever. Or maybe not.

Tancients

122

June 10, 2004 07:47 PM

What about making the player an omnipresent avatar? They could 'possess' a character to have them kill something (Akin to Doungeon Keeper?) or affect the timeline in other ways. Or perhaps through use of a parser, the player could act as a collective subconcious, inserting ideas into a person's head. And the effectiveness would be based upon that person's character traits. A stout religious figure in the town is far, far, less likely to kill someone...unless it was a corrupt priest. Hurrah for random variables!

As far as calculating everything, there should be a finite time period that one could travel in. (Perhaps 2000 years or something?) Then, when a person wanted to travel through time, they'd have to suffer a load screen. During that, the game would calculate the variables, and process the timeline to create the era that they travelled to (According to if they were travelling into the future), and if they were travelling to the past, it would search through the saved file for that city/place to the time they wished to travel to, and put all the variables into memory.

The basic Engine wouldn't be incredibly large, (Depending upon the graphical approach), and most of the stuff could be stored on the harddrive, with only the present being stored in the ram.

[edited by - Tancients on June 10, 2004 8:51:23 PM]

Time Travel & Dynamic Timeline

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Time Travel & Dynamic Timeline

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