Further thoughts on Time Travel

I've been reflecting on something Jon said in relation to our last post about the logistics of time travel. My issue was that I believed that traveling forward in time was "blind". Unlike traveling through space, where we can see ahead of us, we can't see what lies ahead of us in the future. I'd been trying to solve this issue by providing the player with a 6th sense, but I'm beginning to see the wisdom in Jon's seemingly obvious realisation that we read the future every day by reading the present.

If we believe in causality, then by having all of the information about the past and present, we can accurately read the future. To have total information is rarely necessary, because we can do a pretty good job at reading patterns, and in fact there are a whole bunch of jobs that revolve entirely around reading patterns, like playing the stock market, or predicting election turnouts. If you have enough power, you can not just predict the future, but also make steps to alter it, which is exactly what the people who run election campaigns do. We can create models, and introduce new data and make predictions as to how the model evolves over time. What's crucial is that there are many different routes that the future can take depending on the inputs to the system, and that we normally choose to bet on the route that we think will have the best payoff against the smallest risk.

The problem with Biome then, is that the present only shows one avenue to the future - one that is a perfect blend of past and future, and therefore totally unreadable. What Biome needs to do is to present several distinct types of world at any one time. Some might be growing, others shrinking, and the player can strengthen any of these, weakening the others, at any time, creating a different future based on the type of world they’re placing their energy into.

So how could this actually affect Biome? Well, instead of the world being one type of biome at a time, the world would need to be more of a patchworld quilt - sort of like minecraft from high above. A desert and a jungle might sit next to each other, eating into each other until only one remains, although by that time other biomes might have eased into other spaces. This means a world that is slightly more zoomed out than we had first imagined, or at least far more abstracted, because while desert and jungle can sit next to each other, they’re still separated by hundreds of miles. Some plants and animals will grow between biomes, but many others will be specific to a particular kind of world. 

Finally, sorry for all the dry posts lately! We'll start posting more fun pretty things soon.

Tom

How to travel through time

As we’ve hinted at before, Biome is a time travel game. Not the paradox forming kind of time travel, but the “let’s travel around Europe” type of travel that revolves around exploration and discovery. It's opened up a whole bunch of really interesting challenges.

The loop of an exploration game looks something like this.

But we can't see forward in time in the same way we can see forward in space, and Biome doesn't provide a method of doing so. You can only vaguely travel towards a future - I'm sure you've noticed that doing something in the present doesn't necessarily directly affect the future in the way you'd like. And it's hard to reach a future you can't see. So time travel is blind, which makes it a very tricky, powerless form of exploration. Which I guess is why people keep getting into sticky paradox situations (by the way, if you like time travel movies, watch Predestination. It's really good).

Another problem with time travel is that it (can be thought of) as being one dimensional. In real life you can turn your head and see various things in the distance, but with time travel there's only one future, and you can only see it when you get there. If the future is fated, then the player's actions can't affect the future, which means they're basically just watching a pretty movie with their fingers on the fast-forward button. So our time travel needs to allow users to manipulate the world in the present, so to affect the future in a meaningful way.

No exploration game should ignore the destination. It's the journey that makes the game, but the destination defines the experience. In time travel, the destination would be a fixed point in time. This place would need to be it's own reward, as well as providing ample viewpoints to the next destination.

 One solution would be to have a "guide". Something (it could be a rock, or a creature, or almost anything else) that appears in your world that hints at a possible future. If your actions take you closer to that future, then it grows stronger. If your actions take you away from it, it becomes weaker. One issue with this is that you don't get that much control over what future the game shows you. Another is that it fills space in the world that you might not have wanted to sacrifice. 

Alternatively, we accept that time travel doesn't work like spacial travel, and allow people to travel conceptually, based on the type of future they want to see emerge, rather than a specific one that you're shown in advance. 

Stu Maxwell of Shape of The World suggested that we separate the time travel and the world manipulation. You'd, for example, plant some trees, or push the world towards an ice age, and then start travelling. As time goes past, you get to enjoy the results of your interaction. 

We're still exploring solutions for this. If you've got any thoughts, we'd love to hear them!

Bonus: a really great nerdy time travel short story.

http://wenku.baidu.com/view/c45dfc2d7375a417866f8f6e.html 

Tom's been making trees that grow this week! We've been super inspired by Starboretum lately.

In which we talk about Mountain!

Man, Mountain got some serious press attention. It's absolutely crazy how many people have heard of that game, and super surprising how many people actually really enjoyed it!

Not-games (or whatever the hell you want to call them) have been received with some real hostility in the past, and while Mountain is the notest-game of them all, I've seen surprisingly few negative comments about it. The case study for this is, and always will be Proteus, which famously had (and still might) a top comment on its Steam page warning people that Proteus was not a game, and that they shouldn't buy it. I think Mountain dodged that bullet by not looking like a game.

Proteus used a first person camera and controls, a terrain, and a recognisable game-art style. That's sure to invite a lot of comparison. At a glance, Biome shares a similar style to Mountain - a small chunk of land suspended in space. I think that's primarily the reason that we often get asked if we're related to or inspired by Mountain (the answer to that). So there's a lesson in player expectation in there - probably one we should address at some point.

Anyway, this is getting rambly, so lets end it with some bullets.

It's not actually ordered, but that we're above Firewatch is super flattering.

Happy Happy New Year ヾ(^▽^ヾ)

More thoughts on loops and free play

As any game developers reading this will know, the longer you go without implementing your ideas, the more time you get to nit-pick them, and start to doubt yourself. These doubts tend to be over-thought half-truths that can easily lead you down the wrong path - something I've done before on other projects. 

A core problem we've been mulling over for some time now is that Biome currently lacks an arc. There's no beginning, middle or end. This was originally intentional, and it took some time to understand that even though we're not making a movie, you need an arc. You might not believe me here, so think back to the last experience you had. I mean, literally anything. Lets say you had a coffee. Maybe you decided you wanted one. Then, you made it. Then, you drank it. That was the story of when you had a coffee (wasn't it great?), and you remember it because it had closure. Maybe you made something in Minecraft - you decided to make something, and made it. Even if it sucked, you had a plan, and you carried it out.

Let's use Proteus for another example, because Proteus is forever the example in games about free play. In Proteus, they say, you have no goals; you simply explore for exploration's sake. A lot of people don't look further than this; it's enough for them to simply say that they either hated Proteus for that reason, or loved it, for exactly the same reason. But Proteus does have a goal. It just doesn't tell it to you. The goal in Proteus is to get to the ring of light, which "completes" that season. At the end of the forth season, the game ends. Pretty weird that a game about free play has an end, right? But maybe it's not. Everything needs an end, or else you'll get bored of it. In good media, the end comes when you're still relishing the experience, and you'll leave in such spirits that you'll tell all your friends how great Thing X was, and how they should all go and experience it. If the end comes without you quite expecting it, or because you chose to end the experience because it wasn't going anywhere, then you'll take to some blog and rant about how much it sucked instead. 

Maybe this is one of the reasons why having a "core loop" in a game is so important. It gives your experience meaning, which defines one moment as different from the next. So this takes us back to Biome. How do we give structure to free play? The solution, we think, is to give the player reason to play in starts and stops. We're going to link the detail that they can observe in the world to lack of action. If you want to paint the worlds in broad strokes, then play! If you want to stop and smell the flowers, you actually have to stop - or at least slow down. If they're satisfied that they've made some pretty great flowers, then they can call their own closure and shut the app. But this is just our solution. If you've got some thoughts on creating experiences out of free play, then add a comment! We'll be listening.

Finally found a way to get "foam" where land meets water! Hey, its exciting to us.

We're trying to pin down our visual style at the moment so we can finish work on the engine. Lots of work to do, but we're super happy with the current look!

Jo! Just trying out new stuff. Playing around. Hope to get interesting results. But now I'm off to bed ┏((＝￣(ｴ)￣=))┛

We've nearly finished a game that Tom and Jon started working on before Biome, and we thought we'd share! It's nearly done, so we'll let you know here when it's out.

We found new font called Inversionz - so slick! Doesn't have numbers and some characters though, unfortunately.

(http://www.dafont.com/inversionz.font)

Tom! Here is the unicorn ヾ(*ΦωΦ)ﾉ (actually I think the unicorn looks kinda dumb but still cute haha) and some friends

Some weird pearlescent world made to test our improved color tools! Would love to see a unicorn or something in here. Jelena? :D

Hello hello, I'm Jelena :D I'm new in the Biome crew. ꒰⌯͒•̩̩̩́ ᴗ •̩̩̩̀⌯͒꒱ I'll do the art stuff and will model a lot. And I'm super excited to be part of the team. Also this is my first 3D game. I did a few 2D ones, but this is all new to me. So I still have to learn a lot but I do my best ᔪ꒰ ꒪ω꒪ |||꒱

btw check out my blog if you want to see more of my work http://asheepwithabowtie.tumblr.com/

We were on the BBC tonight, apparently! We had about 5 seconds of footage as part of a bigger piece on the wonderful GameCity festival! You can check out the whole article here!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04p21jv/click-01112014