Max Jack Whiteley
MAX JACK WHITELEY
TIME TRAVEL MECHANIC
"MARTY, YOU'RE NOT THINKING FOURTH DIMENTIONALLY"
Time travel is a really cool concept what can be interpreted in many different ways. Movies and TV, books, and even video games have used many different forms of time travel from being a ghost that can not change the future to paradoxical events like stopping time travel from being invented. Yet alongside how time travel works from a narrative point of view, there's also how it works in video games, with many different solutions to the same problem.
​
With this project I wanted to try an recreate a traditionally complex mechanic and try to simplify it. I wanted to do this as different versions of time travel mechanics do things such as hiding and unhiding certain actors, using Non-Euclidean spaces, and the player not being able to time travel at will; while these work they either come with flaws or are very complex to make and polish.

My idea was to use level streaming to have two of the same levels running at once, with one level 10,000 units above the other. The two levels could be decorated and laid out in any fashion with one being the past and the other the future. When the player would hit the activation key, they would instantly be sent to the opposite level they was currently on, making a seamless time travel mechanic without doing tedious or complex tasks.

Using Enumerations, I was easily able to check which version of the level the player was in making the mechanic more stable and less likely to send the player in the opposite direction. Using enumerations also allows for the ability to add on new versions of the level making three or more possible time streams without using many checks and variables possible.
​
I came into an issue of players getting stuck in objects that wasn't present in the previous version of the level they came from, to counteract this I had to make sure the place the player was teleporting to was clear. To do this I sent a capsule trace the same size as the players hitbox to the teleport location. If the location was clear then the player would teleport completing the time jump, if not they would stay where they were.
​
To add polish as well as sell the effect that the player was time travelling rather than simply teleporting, I made a screen effect that when off during the time jump. I distorted the view to make the change in environment and lighting not as harsh via lerping the player cameras FOV out then back to its original position. I added speed lines around the edges of the screen to add visual flair as well as hide the harsh edges, but this also allowed me to give feedback to the player. I changed the colour of the speed lines when the player attempted to time jump to a place they could not, as there is either no map or something in the way. This allowed the player to understand they should move around a little bit rather than be confused on why the time jump didn't work.
As an extra part of the project I created a simple game based around my mechanic as an interactive showcase. This allowed me to not only show the mechanic off in a cool way rather than "look at this for 30 seconds" but it also allowed me to experiment and improve the mechanic as I can see how it would work in an actual game setting.
​
Subject of Time is a light puzzle game based around time travel.
​
This interactive demo was invited to be shown off at Gamebridge 2024, where it received praise for its game design as well as the time travel mechanic and its flexability when it comes to implementation.
Jonathon Frederick - Art pack - Link
Audio SFX - Various royalty free sits
Voice Acting - All original scrips using friends as voice actors