Time Travel

This time travel talk makes me wonder what a Zorkian demake of The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons would be like… I recall there being a Time Machine in one of the Zork games, but I’m pretty sure that was limited to going back to a specific point in time, only gave you access to a handful of rooms in the past, and tying to time travel to any other time would just kill you… Would be interesting to have a large parser map where you could casually step into the past or future with the whole world changing for each step taken on the time axis, though I imagine it would be a bitch to design.

Not familiar with those two games, but someone did make a Sven Co-op map for Half Life 1 of Ocarina of Time first couple of levels, complete with N64 graphics. There was also a IF that I recall about the first few levels. Maybe just the Great Deku Tree dungeon. And then there was a MUD/MUSH, but that server went down, and they put it basically as a chat server RP now. And I have a demo currently in limbo for LoZ related. :sweat_smile:

And a mind screw to play, I suspect. All Things Devours very carefully constrains the time period you have to play about in and the amount of stuff there is to interact with, and it’s still utterly fiendish to puzzle out.

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Actually Inform makes that possible since you can define new directions. You could create a direction and instead of North or South, the directions are Sooner and Later. That part isn’t difficult. The difficult part is re-creating the map in every potential time period and managing logistics such as if you smash a vase in the past making sure it’s consistent in the future, or if you smash it in the future making sure it still exists in the past. There’s great potential for combinatorial explosion.

Yeah, and you could even throw in Ana and Kata to navigate a map with 4 spacial dimensions along with a temporal dimension, but the real challenge would actually be populating the different time periods with interesting stuff and making timeline alterations consistant. Probably a big part of why most video games with time travel either limit themselves to only two time periods, the time travel being more of a linear plot point than an interactive mechanic, do time loop resets where the player’s actions on the greater world are wiped out with each loop, or the time travel is limited to a very small part of the game as a whole. As far as I know, Chrono Trigger and it’s sequel are far greater in scale than any other game with time travel elements.

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I suppose each Room could contain a time ordered list of the Room in each time period. So the logic when the vase breaks in a given Room is to 1) Check the list and find where the Room is in that list and 2) Break the vase in every Room in front of it because you know those will all be the future versions of the current Room.

Speaking of Chrono Trigger, I believe they kind of fudge this since if you open a treasure chest in one time period, it is opened it all time periods.

That might work for fixed objects that are part of the room, but then there’s the issue of moveable objects or even objects duplicated by moving to an earlier time where the object exists with the present version in your possession.

Simplify aggressively and build a game without any moveable objects :wink:

Or you propagate the contents of rooms dynamically…

You could avoid that by making it mental time travel, but then you have to keep track of inventory state across time…

I have a small parser map game called Impossible Stairs that is exactly this idea. One direction institute, another is past. It was awful to code.

First Things First has a larger map and also allows different time periods but it takes some more work to move back and forth.

(I may have replied to the wrong post)

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I remain convinced that the best handling of time travel is still the one in First Things First

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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I found this game to be a very well-made exploration of short-term time travel. It leans INTO the engine mechanics to create something memorable.

This game does what I think “real” time travel would entail:

Changing the past by going back in time creates a new branch.