Case Studies

To investigate what has already been done with time in games, I chose to do case studies on two games: Timeshift and Blinx 2: Masters of Time. These two games feature two different genres (First Person Shooter and Third Person Puzzle/Action) and Blinx, being a bit older, is expected to have fundamentally different implementations.

Let's start with Blinx. What immediately surfaces is the causal nature of the feature in relation to the level design. Most of your time powers (reverse, slow, pause, forward & record) are only useful in specific level design applications. This leads me to define these implementations as "specific" implementations. However, the slow feature is more generically applicable, as it simply stops everything and allows you to do more than one thing with the given time. Also, it is the only power I chose to use in emergencies, which usually meant iminent death by enemy incursion.

So, this leads me to define the opposite end of the spectrum as "generic" implementations. By generic, I mean that they can always be used and that their effect will always be present, without a required predetermined solution being placed in proximity to the player. Blinx clearly chose to implement the feature in a specific fashion, possibly hindered by technical implementation difficulties for generic features.

Now let's take a look at Timeshift. Timeshift uses only generic implementations, meaning that the player has access to them at all times and their effects are always noticeably present. However, they're not always as useful. This is why they also chose to use their generic implementations in specific ways.

The best example of the use of the Time Stop generic feature in a specific way, is in physics puzzles. During time stop, the player can walk on water and nothing will perform physics updates. So, if the player leverages an object upwards, then stops time, and walks across it, he will be able to get up to higher places. This is used a few times in the first few levels of the game.

Another specific implementation of a generic feature is the time reverse feature. In the first level of Timeshift, the player has to run across a suspended hallway, which crumbles right before the player is able to get to it (which is a scripted event). The player then has to activate the time reverse feature in order to be able to get through the hallway before it collapses.

An interesting observation of both singleplayer portions of the games is that all time features are user-centered, meaning the user initiates them and is the centre of all time features. It is also possible, of course, to implement non user-centered features, such as time dilation fields in a level. These could be used in a very interesting fashion for puzzles, where the goal of the user could be: "Get to the finish line before the race starts!".

This still entails that time is a global constant, however. What if time was not a global constant, and you could have different pockets of time progression across a level. For instance, a time reversed pocket would have everything happen in reverse order, without affecting anything happening outside of it. A very easy way to be able to finish before you started would thus simply be to put the clock used to check time into a time-reverse pocket.

Timeshift uses this with their time-grenades in multiplayer. Player can throw reverse/slow/stop grenades and these have expected results. However the reverse grenade takes some getting used to, as it simply fires back any objects entering into it, including players. Their implementation doesn't really feel like you're playing with time, however, and mostly feels like an existing concept has been re-explained using time.

The only novel feature is time-stop. Time slow is obviously slow-motion, which makes performing skill-based actions, like shooting at a moving target, easier to perform. In this case only certain areas of the game are slowed down, making the outside a favourable position. Time-reverse is the least novel, because it's basically a deflection shield. It just shoots everything back, disregarding any relation between spacetime and momentum, which makes it lose any real link it had to time.