Concepts and Design Decisions
- Main Gameplay:
- Players play as time agents to catch time criminal. A single game can only have 5/10 minutes. Players can only touch part of the area within a limited time, and after repeated rounds, keep unlocking the puzzles to find the time criminal.
- Additional Settings:
- Add time gates with time retracing function. Two-player cooperative mode, two people acting together in order to complete all the quests within the time limit. PVP mode, a group of players to track time criminals, another group of players set time traps in order to escape.
- Main Mechanics:
- Similar to Tenet. Bullets will reset after being shot (like 10 seconds), then 10 seconds later bullets will shoot back. Time criminal can set items such as mines, projectiles, timers, etc. that reset time, and the time police can use them by collecting these objects, while the police come with items that can limit the area to prohibit the use of reset items, or use items that advance/actively trigger time traps.
Items
- Clock: show the rest of the time
- Injection: extend the single-game time
- Time bomb: reversing time after explode (does not affect characters)
- Bullet: shot and can be reversed
Goals
As the time police use repeated entries into the same timeline to gain clues, advance the plot and catch the time criminal.
Reference
Loki
After stealing the Tesseract during the events of Avengers: Endgame (2019), an alternate version of Loki is brought to the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucratic organization that exists outside of time and space and monitors the timeline. They give Loki a choice: face being erased from existence due to being a “time variant”, or help fix the timeline and stop a greater threat. Loki ends up trapped in his own crime thriller, traveling through time.
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Tenet
The film’s plot revolves around reversing the entropy of things and people, resulting in time reversibility. Tenet makes reference to physics concepts including annihilation, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s demon, the grandfather paradox, and Feynman and Wheeler’s Absorber Theory. It has a kind of bullets with “inverted” entropy, meaning they move backward through time.
Case study
Minit
The game’s premise is that each of the player’s lives only lasts for one minute, resulting in “a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time”.
This is very similar to the background setting of my project, where players also need to explore repeatedly within a time limit in order to keep advancing the game. In Minit, the game gives players different residences as archive points to ensure that players can have a different range of exploration within the 60-second time limit each round, which avoids too much repetitive content caused by too small a map.