The first half of the game plays kinda like a tower defense game, except there is one peculiar enemy that just appears, disappears, and multiplies strategically (eventually forcing a loss), then it switches to you being that character with time-control… complete with seeing previous threads (your own character) sorta like adding another unit each time you rewind time.
Holy shit, the idea of enemies that also have deft control over time itself did not even occur to me.
Oh god, that could be baffling to try to concept and balance, oh man, but if you could, dang, and you sound like you’ve got a simple enough in basic concept, bounded enough… but so many possible things within those bounds…
I have some similar ideas about a story driven time travel game where it’s set up so that at one point you face an anonymous enemy, which forces you to trigger certain conditions in the stage and then they escape.
Later in the game you return to this stage at the same point in time, expecting to face that enemy again, but you are this “enemy”, and the game nudges you into replicating the exact same sequence of events so that you take the actions which the “enemy” did so your (NPC) past self can replay the exact steps you previously took.
But the game doesn’t show this clearly to you the player until you completed the stage - while your character is shown to have noticed something strange, the game doesn’t show you the player (or you character’s party) that you faced yourself until the end of the stage, using different positions and camera angles to hide it from you and the party. And if you manage to replicate the event chain perfectly, you’ll get to see your party members being visibly stunned when you see them realize it was a time loop (your actions in the stage breaks the loop), and hopefully the player can be made to feel like they experienced a time loop, as if they really faced off with themselves twice (“how did the game know I would do it that way?”)
That sounds difficult to pull off, but incredible if you could.
Not only is a time loop built into the main story, recreating something from another perspective… it also has branching paths in the more linear sense of a roleplaying game / imsim.
I like this idea too, but …‘nudging’ the player, without it being too estoeric, or too obvious… that ain’t easy lol.
I can see a few ways to nudge people, like a puzzle that’s more linear than it looks like, or selecting the tasks in the next version of the encounter based on the events in the previous version of it to match (you wouldn’t see clearly what the “enemy” is doing so you wouldn’t notice that those actions the second round weren’t fixed, the game is just trying to replicate the interactions between past/future self and the rest of the stage is completely arbitrary). Basically treating it as a choreography problem.
Maybe even make it feel more “wild” by recording how the player controls the character during the game before that point, use something like generative ML to make the “enemy” AI act as the game think you would respond to your past self, then when you’re the future you returning to the stage the game nudges you into using your abilities in the same way (altering how you have to use your powers to solve puzzles to match how the previous “predicted AI you”, making you face other enemies and use your abilities in similar ways to win fights)
I was going to suggest basically what you said in the first paragraph, but I didn’t want to influence your own creativity =D
As for the second paragraph… depending on exactly what you mean by machine learning… say, possibly a more brute force, genetic-mutation, run 100s or 1000s of iterations to generate a ‘strategy’ … that may be overkill.
I would suggest looking into Goal Oriented Action Planning, GOAP. GOAP is basically a theory, a conceptual framework of how to program AI, in the video game sense of AI… but it is way, way more computational lightweight.
It is also what made FEAR’s AI so distinct, (the FEAR AI programmer invented it and named, has either an academically published or at least technical ‘white paper’ on it), convincing players that it was actually intelligently reacting to them, the environment, and making its own decisions… because arguably, it was, or at least doing a much more ‘realistic’ approximation of this at a fundamental level.
The difference between this game, your game’s implementation of GOAP and most other ones… would be that it is like, the levels themselves, the sort of plot line itself, the ‘dungeon master’… that is the Goal Oriented thinking agent, not just an npc entity in the world.
You can find some good explanations of how it works, how to implement it in a game engine, on youtube… though ironically I must warn you that a lot of tutorials from basicslly indie devs… they often do not fully even grasp the concept.
Which is funny to me, as they are not intelligent enough to understand a model of machine intelligence, yet feel confident enough to explain it or criticize it, lol.
But yeah, if you have both a comprehensive tracking and logging system for the player’s actions… well, oversimplified, GOAP roughly invovles a sort of pathfinding algo traversing a node graph, with weights between nodes… and connections between nodes, or the ‘cost’ of traversing them… changing based on the agent’s current situation.
So… you would roughly be trying to do a ‘best fit approximation’ of the player’s own decision making process… into the the node graph the game itself uses… and then you could maybe reproduce the player themselve’s approach to decision making, and then make that into an npc agent, if you wanted them to truly like, mirror fight someone that ‘thinks’ like them, at some point.
The idea would be that you could move in the depth axis just as an fps player (or maybe arcady spaceship or aircraft game?) moves through all 3 dimensions.
Though honestly I don’t play many 2d platformers, what I’ve seen is more of a … reset or rewind kind of paradigm, or jump forward in time, fastforward, or pause.
I’m thinking of some kind of… like you’d have to solve certain environment puzzles, defeat certain enemies, by deftly and precisely navigating through time as much as deftly executing platform jumps and 2d combat.
EDIT:
Like maybe imagine this with either a DPad + Stick or Twin Stick setup.
The one of those is your normal 2d movement, the other has one axis that is time forward/backward.
Or, maybe, left right is side to side, your character is some kind of unable to jump or crouch, but instead time phases with up/down?
(jump and crouch are replaced by… gravity temporarily off, gravity temporarily x 4?)
Pair it with maybe some kind of time travel stamina/mana meter, you gain more ‘endursnce’ with experience or after getting a treasure or accomplishing some task.
Could I guess also work with a top down or 2.5 uh, perspective as well, I guess?
Your description kind of made me think of Miegakure. Though it’s not about time, it is a 3D platformer where you have to move your 3D reality through a 4th spatial dimension to uncover the puzzle.
Really looking forward to playing it when it comes out.
The Zelda games I’ve played that feature time travel basically just have a ‘past world’ and ‘future world’.
…
Using my original analogy… So your 2D game is your screen.
The 3rd dimension would be into the screen, or toward your face.
A past/future flip is just two layers.
I’m trying to think of something thats more like… 10s, 100s, 1000s of ‘layers’, very fundamentally implemented as a basic game mechanic.
Like, you’d need to be weaving through time just as much as a normal game has you weaving through space, you’d have some puzzles or fights where you’d need to be moving through time and space simultaneously…
Apparently Braid is like this?
…
Majora’s Mask is arguably the closest to this of any Zelda game, in that you csn functionally jump to many, many more than just two layers, tons and tons if events and npc like… world paths put them in different places at different exact times, you can Double Time song half a day into the future, unless you’re doing some crazy speedrun you’re probably gonna need to rewind the clock many times in a normal playthrough.
I’ll have to check out Portal 2 w/ time travel though, haven’t played that.
In practical terms, Braid is probably closest. You have time rewind mechanics, in some stages it’s selective where rewind applies to specific objects AND/OR specific areas (so it’s not just try/retry, but actual time manipulation and setup)
Shoutout to Superhot, where time moves when you move (bullettime on steroids)
Insano game idea:
2D platformer… but its actually 3D.
But the third dimension… is time.
…somebody has to have done something like that already, right?
I think that’s bastion
Braid and Prince of Persia, kind of?
The first half of the game plays kinda like a tower defense game, except there is one peculiar enemy that just appears, disappears, and multiplies strategically (eventually forcing a loss), then it switches to you being that character with time-control… complete with seeing previous threads (your own character) sorta like adding another unit each time you rewind time.
Holy shit, the idea of enemies that also have deft control over time itself did not even occur to me.
Oh god, that could be baffling to try to concept and balance, oh man, but if you could, dang, and you sound like you’ve got a simple enough in basic concept, bounded enough… but so many possible things within those bounds…
Run with your idea! I like this!
I have some similar ideas about a story driven time travel game where it’s set up so that at one point you face an anonymous enemy, which forces you to trigger certain conditions in the stage and then they escape.
Later in the game you return to this stage at the same point in time, expecting to face that enemy again, but you are this “enemy”, and the game nudges you into replicating the exact same sequence of events so that you take the actions which the “enemy” did so your (NPC) past self can replay the exact steps you previously took.
But the game doesn’t show this clearly to you the player until you completed the stage - while your character is shown to have noticed something strange, the game doesn’t show you the player (or you character’s party) that you faced yourself until the end of the stage, using different positions and camera angles to hide it from you and the party. And if you manage to replicate the event chain perfectly, you’ll get to see your party members being visibly stunned when you see them realize it was a time loop (your actions in the stage breaks the loop), and hopefully the player can be made to feel like they experienced a time loop, as if they really faced off with themselves twice (“how did the game know I would do it that way?”)
That sounds difficult to pull off, but incredible if you could.
Not only is a time loop built into the main story, recreating something from another perspective… it also has branching paths in the more linear sense of a roleplaying game / imsim.
I like this idea too, but …‘nudging’ the player, without it being too estoeric, or too obvious… that ain’t easy lol.
I can see a few ways to nudge people, like a puzzle that’s more linear than it looks like, or selecting the tasks in the next version of the encounter based on the events in the previous version of it to match (you wouldn’t see clearly what the “enemy” is doing so you wouldn’t notice that those actions the second round weren’t fixed, the game is just trying to replicate the interactions between past/future self and the rest of the stage is completely arbitrary). Basically treating it as a choreography problem.
Maybe even make it feel more “wild” by recording how the player controls the character during the game before that point, use something like generative ML to make the “enemy” AI act as the game think you would respond to your past self, then when you’re the future you returning to the stage the game nudges you into using your abilities in the same way (altering how you have to use your powers to solve puzzles to match how the previous “predicted AI you”, making you face other enemies and use your abilities in similar ways to win fights)
I was going to suggest basically what you said in the first paragraph, but I didn’t want to influence your own creativity =D
As for the second paragraph… depending on exactly what you mean by machine learning… say, possibly a more brute force, genetic-mutation, run 100s or 1000s of iterations to generate a ‘strategy’ … that may be overkill.
I would suggest looking into Goal Oriented Action Planning, GOAP. GOAP is basically a theory, a conceptual framework of how to program AI, in the video game sense of AI… but it is way, way more computational lightweight.
It is also what made FEAR’s AI so distinct, (the FEAR AI programmer invented it and named, has either an academically published or at least technical ‘white paper’ on it), convincing players that it was actually intelligently reacting to them, the environment, and making its own decisions… because arguably, it was, or at least doing a much more ‘realistic’ approximation of this at a fundamental level.
The difference between this game, your game’s implementation of GOAP and most other ones… would be that it is like, the levels themselves, the sort of plot line itself, the ‘dungeon master’… that is the Goal Oriented thinking agent, not just an npc entity in the world.
You can find some good explanations of how it works, how to implement it in a game engine, on youtube… though ironically I must warn you that a lot of tutorials from basicslly indie devs… they often do not fully even grasp the concept.
Which is funny to me, as they are not intelligent enough to understand a model of machine intelligence, yet feel confident enough to explain it or criticize it, lol.
But yeah, if you have both a comprehensive tracking and logging system for the player’s actions… well, oversimplified, GOAP roughly invovles a sort of pathfinding algo traversing a node graph, with weights between nodes… and connections between nodes, or the ‘cost’ of traversing them… changing based on the agent’s current situation.
So… you would roughly be trying to do a ‘best fit approximation’ of the player’s own decision making process… into the the node graph the game itself uses… and then you could maybe reproduce the player themselve’s approach to decision making, and then make that into an npc agent, if you wanted them to truly like, mirror fight someone that ‘thinks’ like them, at some point.
Braid definitely has a large section like that, and a great final stage.
Ah well shit, I was legitimately asking, I haven’t played too many platformers in a while, sounds like I should check it out!
Braid is like 15 years old now, not exactly a recent release.
Yeah I’m in my 30s, mostly stopped playing 2d platformers around age … 15? 16?
I’ve been playing 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel it’s remarkably easy to understand, all considered. It’s only partially mind bending.
Ok that, that sounds incredible rofl!
there are puzzle games that do that sort of.
I don’t see how that would be any different from a regular time travel platformer
The idea would be that you could move in the depth axis just as an fps player (or maybe arcady spaceship or aircraft game?) moves through all 3 dimensions.
Though honestly I don’t play many 2d platformers, what I’ve seen is more of a … reset or rewind kind of paradigm, or jump forward in time, fastforward, or pause.
I’m thinking of some kind of… like you’d have to solve certain environment puzzles, defeat certain enemies, by deftly and precisely navigating through time as much as deftly executing platform jumps and 2d combat.
EDIT:
Like maybe imagine this with either a DPad + Stick or Twin Stick setup.
The one of those is your normal 2d movement, the other has one axis that is time forward/backward.
Or, maybe, left right is side to side, your character is some kind of unable to jump or crouch, but instead time phases with up/down?
(jump and crouch are replaced by… gravity temporarily off, gravity temporarily x 4?)
Pair it with maybe some kind of time travel stamina/mana meter, you gain more ‘endursnce’ with experience or after getting a treasure or accomplishing some task.
Could I guess also work with a top down or 2.5 uh, perspective as well, I guess?
Your description kind of made me think of Miegakure. Though it’s not about time, it is a 3D platformer where you have to move your 3D reality through a 4th spatial dimension to uncover the puzzle.
Really looking forward to playing it when it comes out.
Well hey that sounds quite interesting! Thanks for putting it on my radar =D
A Link
through timeto the past (Zelda), and some more like it.It’s 3D, but there’s a Portal 2 mod with time travel
A Link Through Time?
Do you mean A Link To The Past?
???
The Zelda games I’ve played that feature time travel basically just have a ‘past world’ and ‘future world’.
…
Using my original analogy… So your 2D game is your screen.
The 3rd dimension would be into the screen, or toward your face.
A past/future flip is just two layers.
I’m trying to think of something thats more like… 10s, 100s, 1000s of ‘layers’, very fundamentally implemented as a basic game mechanic.
Like, you’d need to be weaving through time just as much as a normal game has you weaving through space, you’d have some puzzles or fights where you’d need to be moving through time and space simultaneously…
Apparently Braid is like this?
…
Majora’s Mask is arguably the closest to this of any Zelda game, in that you csn functionally jump to many, many more than just two layers, tons and tons if events and npc like… world paths put them in different places at different exact times, you can Double Time song half a day into the future, unless you’re doing some crazy speedrun you’re probably gonna need to rewind the clock many times in a normal playthrough.
I’ll have to check out Portal 2 w/ time travel though, haven’t played that.
In practical terms, Braid is probably closest. You have time rewind mechanics, in some stages it’s selective where rewind applies to specific objects AND/OR specific areas (so it’s not just try/retry, but actual time manipulation and setup)
Shoutout to Superhot, where time moves when you move (bullettime on steroids)
Something like Titanfall 2 but in 2D?
Eh, thats basically just hitting a time pause button.
Ah yeah the famous genre of the time travel platformer
Makes me think of braid
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Damn, deleted, I’ll never know what this said lol.
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