SpaceSimCentral

All you SSC gamers out there, so how about you get your head around this idea, time travel in a game!Achron is the world's first meta-time strategy game, a real-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently.Q: Paradoxes?! You know, grandfather paradox, units fighting side by side?A: Paradoxes can exist, but since the window of time is limited (e.g., an 8 minute window) all events eventually fall off. A paradox will oscillate between its different states until one of the states reaches the edge of the time window, leaving the players locked into one of the two states. Example: in the case of the grandfather paradox (where you use a factory to build a tank, have the tank time travel to before it was built, and then use it to destroy the factory) you will play with the paradox until it 'falls off' the time window, at which point there is a 50/50 chance of either the tank lives and the factory is destroyed (because the tank destroyed the factory), or the factory remains and the tank goes back in time and is lost. All paradoxes are nicely resolved with time. Q: My head is exploding already. Are you sure this is easy?A: Yes, though grandfather paradoxes are the most complicated aspect of the game, they don't tend to happen much in actual gameplay. The rest is super quick to learn. It's like learning to use a DVR control to rewatch a tv show or using your DVD control to jump around chapters in a movie - once you start using time travel it's really simple, but if you've never picked up a remote controller before, those play and 'next-chapter' buttons look scary. We've been play-testing for 4 years and have learned how to make this game accessible, taking people who never played an RTS before and have them effectively using time travel 5 minutes into the game. We do this by unveiling time travel gradually to the player, so you are not fully thrust into it right away, but can learn to play it one step at a time. http://www.achrongame.com

I had a sudden question coming to the top of my mind**... how will you deal with the different verbal modes and times? The fact that you can kill your grandparent before he sired your progenitor is easy mode compared to the requirements of dealing with time travel grammar.P. S. This is a shameless plug to a rather well know five part trilogy

The concept sounds a bit like a game I LOVED a few years ago, Timeshift : http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/timeshift/Great game ! Hopefully this game will be good too.

Sounds interesting, there was an old snes game with time travel too, Chrono Trigger I think it was called, although that pales in comparison in its use of time.I watched the video, wow a timeline for the battle... such an interesting concept, it seems like a very clever way of adding another layer to the game.Edit//I wonder what would happen if... you create some 'mechs' from your factory, and both you and your enemy both send units back in time, while in the past the enemy manages to destroy your factory that was to produce the mechs in the future... what happens to the mechs? It would be bloody awesome if they just blinked out of existence

s2odan wrote:
I wonder what would happen if... you create some 'mechs' from your factory, and both you and your enemy both send units back in time, while in the past the enemy manages to destroy your factory that was to produce the mechs in the future... what happens to the mechs? It would be bloody awesome if they just blinked out of existence
That is exactly the scenario addressed in the original post, where it is referred to as a 'grandfather paradox'