Who am I? What am I doing here?!

ChipX86 on 2011/04/09 07:36 of Mop and Bucket

Wow, what a week. This has been my first PyWeek and it's been crazy. I took the week off work, hardly slept, and have been having a blast putting together my first real game. I made a couple small things in the past, but nothing major, so there was a lot of learning this time around.

So, 9 Times. This is the category I was dreading at first, but loved once I figured it out. The "obvious" game mechanic is doing something 9 times, in some form, but I didn't want to go there. I instead decided 9 time periods would be far more interesting.

So I put together a puzzle/platformer called Forever End. It's a game about the aftermath of a devastating impact by some sort of unknown artifact, which scientists have dubbed the Omega 13. The impact fractured time in several areas, causing time to blend together. Any human entering the area suffers death.

Based on their research of the time fractures, scientists put together a probe that can withstand the time distortions and sent it in to collect the pieces of this artifact. The probe is capable of shifting between the affected time periods in each level. Each level has three time periods, with a total of nine.

The main game mechanic is the time shifting. In each time period on each level, the location is the same, but of course things have changed over time.

I think there's a lot I could do with this in the future. Unfortunately, it's difficult to learn such things as collision detection and quad trees while putting together a time-shifting platforming game engine and doing the art and levels and everything. I'm a one-person team, so something had to give. That's not to say that the levels are *bad*. I just would love to polish them more :) I'll probably continue with it after pyweek, flesh out the game some more.

I sprinkled references to other games and movies dealing with time travel throughout the game. The time periods, for example, mostly come from Chrono Trigger (we have 65,000,000 BC, 12,000 BC, 600 AD, 1000 AD, 1999 AD, 2300 AD, and then 40,000,000 AD, 1 NE (New Era) and 300 NE). There are a few other items and references as well. If you play them, you'll get it.

There's also a twist ending.

All in all, this has been a blast, and I'll probably work through the night to polish it up a bit more.