News You Can Bruise for 2005 March 26

I wrote about sockets all day and now my shoulder sockets are sore.

This is the game that makes our fortune, Leonard me boy. Time travel game! In other such games you experience time travel from the perspective of a human: you turn back the clock to a specific point and relive events from there. In this game, you are a four-dimensional being! To you, the timeline looks like the pages of a flip book spread out before you. Like a Trafalmadorian you can visit any segment of the timeline that strike your fancy. Unlike a Trafalmadorian you can also change the timeline. Your changes have ripple effects into the future.

The game board looks like a 2D grid. The squares contain people and objects in different states over time. That is, the x axis is stepwise "time" and the y axis is stepwise "state of person/object #y". Your job on each level of the game is to meddle with the timeline to achieve a certain result (eg. to make two people fall in love). You can insert items into the timeline, move objects around, etc. Every time you do something at time x, the timeline is redrawn from x+1 onwards. With the right modelling the possible actions and resulting events could be very flexible.

It is a turn-based puzzle game because of course it makes no sense to have any time-related operations since the whole point is you exist outside of time.

How do I know this game will make my fortune? TIME TRAVEL, DUH!

Next time on NYCB Game Design Brainstorming: Captain Compliance! The game where the object is to get permission to play the game! Inspired by my review of oki. I'm still not sure exactly how it will go, though.

OpenOffice Writer autocorrected "naive" to "naïve", then immediately flagged it as misspelled and suggested "naive" as the correct spelling. Come on, different parts of OpenOffice Writer, let's see some cöoperation cooperation cöoperation coöperation cooperation coöperation here!