So for this midweek post (not sure if we will be able to keep it up with two posts a week but hey we can try at least) we want to look again more to the game play of Project Temporality in the coming weeks we will talk about some of the core ideas and concepts that formed TP, we will also talk about our design philosophies and what we think will make a game fun, why pacing is so important to a game like PT and what we are doing to making it perfect.
But before all of that we just wanted to try to paint a clearer image in your mind about what PT is all about, it is kind of a hard game to explain in a way that allows people to really grasp it. Unless you actually play some levels it might look a lot simpler than it actually is. A big part of the basic idea of Project Temporality is freedom since you can manipulate time in a very flexible time different people will find different solutions to the problems with different usage of your time points. To make a simple analogy if you played the two portal games in the first portal game almost all walls where portal able surfaces which meant there was a lot of different ways to traverse the maps you had freedom in how you selected to solve the puzzles however in portal 2 the amount of surface you could place a portal on was often very limited which meant a lot of puzzles just involved finding portal-able surfaces first and then you could quickly figure out what to do. For me that felt boxed in I was walking through the steps someone else placed before me instead of finding my own way and my own solutions (btw I do love Portal 2 too of course). Thats the feeling we want to capture with Project Temporality it’s your world and your solutions we just create the puzzles. And during our focus testing it has happened quite a lot of times that testers solved a puzzle in a way we haven’t imagined.
Of course not all puzzles are like that, especially not since we showed you the solution. Which is why that first time experience is such a important part of the game and it is also the reason we don’t want to show of to many puzzles or to much about them here because then you will loose that wonderful step of discovering the world and how to manipulate it by yourself. However we want to show something here.
This is an top down image from the first puzzle involving lasers and mirrors. We have marked the entrance and the exit to the room for you we have also marked a key in the upper right room that needs to be collected and carried to the door by the exit to open it. We have a laser that shoots a beam that you can’t pass through and a mirror that would reflect the laser if hit (like with the doted lines) the two buttons rotate the laser clockwise and the mirror counter clockwise. However they only do this if you are standing on them. If the laser hits you it pushes you away and might push you down the hole. If that happens you die.
So what we’ll do is that you post your ideas for how you would solve the puzzle in the comments (using what you know about Project Temporality's Game Play) and then in a day or so we post how we would have done it and how the mechanics to solve it works in PT. Remember that a good puzzle is trivial once you know the solutions so we believe it will be more fun for everyone involved this way,
