You are a time traveler sent back in time to solve a crime. You’re not allowed to go back to your own time (in the future) until you’ve solved the crime (and proven your case). A mind-bending puzzle game.
Gameplay
You play a single player, always centered on the screen. You can do two things: move around and travel in time.
Travel In Time
- With the press of a button, you can scroll forward/backward in time.
- Time is always frozen for you: you look at a specific instant of time.
Move Around
- Joystick/arrow keys to walk around and jump (platforming controls)
- Another button for interacting with objects
Visuals
The whole game takes place inside/around a single cabin. (Although the cabin has several floors, rooms, a basement, and perhaps a small area around it.)
It’s a 2D game, pixel art, looking from a side view.
Timeline
Create a tool/interface for easily creating timelines. (Similar to Adobe After Effects timeline style.)
On game load, this timeline is converted into individual frames.
Frame start + end are interpolated. (Especially for moving people, we only want to say “starts here” and then “goes there”.)
Now, in the game, we can immediately load the frame you want.
When loading, we might want to check which objects actually change, if loading the whole thing is too time consuming.
Idea
Probably something like: a bomb killed someone. Find out who did it and arrest them ( + evidence?)
You must figure out the pieces of the puzzle, gather clues, perhaps change a few things, watch conversations between people.
You start just after the killing happened.
At the start of the game, your view is limited in all ways:
- You can only travel X amount of time forward/backward
- You can only travel in steps/jumps that are quite large.
- You only see one small part of the cabin. The rest is underlit, not accessible, or simply doesn’t exist yet (in this time).