Random Thoughts

In Portal, users create portals to shorten the length between two points and thus diminish the amount of time it will take them to reach these places, but also to remove any obstacles that might be between these two points preventing players from reaching them normally. The interesting thing about this is that it does not distort the time-space relationship. It merely allows the user to bypass sections of it. Maybe the idea is to do the same with time. Distort the reality of time, but still uphold its relation to space.

What if, for instance, instead of a portal being a window between two points, the portal was a window between two times. Let's say the player can spawn a portal on a wall, and when the user walks through this portal, he/she is transported back a fixed amount of time. The user can then choose to readily switch between timezones by entering the portal.

Or, perhaps it can be interesting for time dilation to be a factor in game mechanics. What if time moves slower or backwards between certain areas. You could use this to your advantage when attempting to solve puzzles or plant traps for oncoming enemies.

The hardest thing to do in these concepts is to clearly split the timezones for the player, whilst maintaining a connection of causality. It might be disturbing to the player to do something in the past that does not leave any trails in the future, however, when in the past one does not want to see the things he/she did in the future.

The most interesting thing I've created so far is a simple example of how time dilation can influence irregular systems. Take flocking, for example. I was testing to see if I could create time dilation (making things move slower in relation to their distance to the mouse-cursor, in this case) and applied it to a flocking algorithm I had in flash. The interesting result was that this allowed me to guide their direction, as I could intentionally slow the movement of specific parts of their group. Since flocking is based on group movement, this lead to the other entities of the group to move back more towards the units I had slowed down, which was something I hadn't intended to do.

I'm hoping the same emergence can be triggered in playtesting of specific features to allow the design of the feature to further develop.