4D puzzle game concept

Today I'm talking about how I came up with the idea and started my game. It was the 90s and I was playing my NES, Back to the Future 2&3 was in my console. If you never played it, it's a 2d platform puzzle game involving time travel. Parts 2 and 3 are on the same console, but they are different games and you need to beat the 2 to get the code to enter to play 3. In part 2 you can travel to 3 different time periods like the movie, 1955 , 1985 and 2015. It had cool time related puzzles like there would be some platform you need to get on in 1985 and there was no way to get up there, so you go to 1955 to the same location and you plant a seed, when you go back to 1985 there will be a tree were you planted the seed and you can use it to get to the platform.

So it encourages thinking forth dimensionally! These puzzles were pretty cool, but not what inspired me.. So all this going to and from different timelines, you would end up creating time duplicates. So you go back to 1955 again and there is another you running around performing all the actions you di last time you were there. It was pretty cool! These duplicates did whatever you the player did before and if you interfere with them it would cause a time paradox and ripping time and space apart! In the game this means that if you collide with a time duplicates you loose a life. This was just a small part of the game though.

Many years later I play The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom! It's a charming game with a great aesthetic, it is also a puzzle platformer involving time. It's really brilliant how the developer constructed the game and rekindles my desire to make my own time travel puzzle game. But I wanted to keep the mechanic of no interference with the player and the duplicates like from BTTF.

So I have been sitting on this idea for years and after some failed game attempts I decided to go for it! The 1st hurdle was recording the player movements and playing them back. It was tricky, but after a couple days I got it working! Then I made it so that collisions would trigger a game over, but I still needed some obstacles, some puzzles for the player to solve. I had different ideas, big buttons that control doors and elevators,  pushing blocks around to reach higher platforms and to push blocks onto buttons, but I wanted to keep this really simple and small scope, this game was going good so I didn't want to add anything that would cause issues.

So because I wanted to make the game over condition be creating a paradox, that would mean interrupting a duplicates routine in any would would cause a paradox and end the game, for instance, if I move a block on a switch, then when I go back in time a duplicate will do that, but if I were to get tot he block 1st and move it before the duplicate got there, it would cause a paradox and should end the game. This all seemed like way too much to keep track of for a simple game so I cut it out completely. Elevators also seemed like they could be a bit of work too, like I have to reset their states every time I go back in time and I got to keep track if a duplicate is supposed to be in a elevator and etc etc.. So I cut that too. Eventually all I was left with were buttons and doors, but decided that is enough for a minimal game and I would try to make the most of the one mechanic.

Keeping with this small scope I had everything working in a week! I couldn't believe I did so much in so little time, but there was one issue.. read about it in my next dev log Changing the Game!

So this is how I came up with the idea and implemented it, how I kept it small scope and easy to finish but still offer fun challenge to the player. Sometimes it's not about having a lot of mechanics it's about getting the most you can out of a small amount of mechanics. Hope this help you with keeping things small scope but still fun!