One of my favorite design ideas was from Storynexus - this is mainly in context of a QBN, but I like the philosophy:
Punishing Characters
Punish characters – they’ll love you for it. And it’s good for introducing a bit of strategy to your world.
When something goes wrong for a character – usually failing a challenge, but also choosing something that has a significant downside – you should mark that. You could take away some of their progress or resource qualities. Or you could introduce new qualities that are a problem and need to be managed (like Nightmares or Wounds in Fallen London). This is good, because it gives a sense of risk and reward. And it allows options like spending resources to reduce these menacing qualities.
It also means you get to be quite mean to characters if these problems get out of hand. That’s often fun to write, and it provides scars and war stories for characters. They won’t remember when you took a few actions of progress away from them, but they’ll remember being thrown into the weasel pits.
The formal name for games whose notion of time is like Ballyhoo “clock-based game”, where events are based on game clock. There are a number of games that have this feature. One reason it’s not more popular is that one has to be careful to allow enough margin for people to have reasonable opportunity to succeed at timed objectives - something that has proven difficult to do in a manner perceived as fair.
I think you’re thinking of Deadline and the like, hence my suggested “simulated time” (Or, more fancifully, quantum or indeterminate game world). The player absolutely can miss a lot of stuff in those simulations. I don’t think people make many of those games anymore. Ballyhoo only advances the global “clock” when specific actions are performed by the player, for instance frightening the elephant IIRC. I don’t think there are any timed objectives in Ballyhoo, other than maybe the endgame and a few other encounters. however, those are based on local timers rather than on a global, ticking clock. I think Ballyhoo time remains a common approach. It was quite popular in the old Sierra games, though the triggers were often frustratingly obtuse.
I’m sure that someone will chime in if I’ve misspoken.
That is also a type of clock game, it is simply that in Ballyhoo more of the actions don’t move the clock forward (there are some that don’t move it in Deadline either). The breakthrough Ballyhoo made was in designing a sufficiently forgiving and coherent design that the things that move time only move relatively inconsequential things - unless some action happens that move the plot forward substantially. Before this, “clock time games” tended to be either very simulationist (like Deadline and lots of Sierra games) or take out the clock altogether and just have things be entirely event-based with perhaps a decorative clock for setting evocation purposes (like a large proportion of IF involving time changes in the “independent revival era”).
Just to understand: I can’t think of an instance in Ballyhoo where an independent clock changes anything, substantial or otherwise. Can you think of an example?
I can think of timers, but those are localized. There’s no global clock. A player might, upon entering a trailer, only have x number of turns to complete an action before being kicked out. But that’s a closed circuit. It starts upon entry and stops upon exit.
The clock is an illusion in Ballyhoo as far as I know, a rationale for global changes in the game world. I admittedly haven’t played Ballyhoo in a while (my playthrough is only through AMFV), but I can’t find evidence of an independent clock in my transcript.
I do think it’s useful to distinguish between “you need to be in the right place on the right turn count or you’ll miss it” (Deadline, Suspended, All Things Devours, Varicella, A Change in the Weather) and “time doesn’t advance until you achieve an objective in the game” (Anchorhead, Vespers, Counterfeit Monkey, it sounds like Ballyhoo also though I haven’t played it, and I think Plundered Hearts).
It’s not an IF example, but the second one is also what we see in games like Bloodborne, where most events happen in real-time (every second matters in a fight), but the sun doesn’t set until you beat a certain boss, and the moon doesn’t rise until you first visit a certain area. In other words, there’s a clock that’s affected by every action, and a separate clock that only advances with progress in the game.
I’ve toyed with an IF game set over a particular time frame - namely, midnight to around 4 AM on New Year’s Day - that does have timed events and such, but it is very much a ‘play multiple times’ type of game. I usually dislike the sort of game that you can’t conceivably ‘win’ in a single playthrough, but the idea is that it is more about exploring a world (in the loosest sense, it’s set within the downtown of a city) and uncovering the ‘quest’ in the process. If you played to the end or died, the end message would be something like ‘… but that was not how the story went’, until you got the ‘actual’ story itself.
On a much more minor scale, I was also toying with how to implement having a jukebox and nightclub mention a particular song playing depending upon the time in the game.