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Loop Thesis (https://loop-thesis.com https://loop-thesis.com), a multiplayer time traveling puzzle/arena shooter that allows players to simultaneously travel to

Loop Thesis (https://loop-thesis.com https://loop-thesis.com), a multiplayer time traveling puzzle/arena shooter that allows players to simultaneously travel to different points on the timeline. In co-op/multiplayer this allows you to do things like send someone back in time to open a door for another player in the future, or pull objects outside of time to effect someone in the past. There's a big focus on experimentation and discovery. To that end, I never fake or script any of the gameplay systems -- so there's a completely internally consistent time-travel simulation running all of the time, even during menus and in lobbies. The goal with that is to make a world that is always predictable; Loop Thesis is about figuring out how the world works and figuring out the subtle implications of its rules. It's supposed to capture that feeling you had the first time you were programming and a concept like pointers actually clicked for you. It's about these tiny cool moments where you suddenly realize all of the things you can do with a mechanic, or you suddenly understand why this obscure interaction you were dismissing three levels ago actually matters. For that to work, there can't ever be a point in the game where you ask why something happened, and the answer is, "oh, that's just a glitch, or a hard-coded interaction." Literally everything, from menus, to how save files work, to even how maps load in and out of memory, is consistent with the internal mechanics of the time-travel simulation.

jessehorne 7y ago
This is brilliant! If the game is anything like the picture you've painted in this comment, it's going to be remembered for a long time.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Thanks! If you're interested in this design philosophy of having almost radical consistency within a game's systems, I wrote a blog post early on in development about how that influences the way the game is coded. It's a little out of date; since writing it some of the mechanics have changed, but it still provides a good overview of what I mean when I say that nothing in the game is faked. https://danshumway.com/blog/design-is-implementation/ https://danshumway.com/blog/design-is-implementation/ Ironically, in this article I mention: > It's possible to take this philosophy too far. When I first started building an update system for entities within the world, I experimented with using events and special methods to pass around information... I still use events, but only when it makes sense to do so. The current rewrite I'm working on is going in the opposite direction here, relying much more heavily on events and only using direct object references when its absolutely necessary. This is, again, to make gameplay more consistent; but also just because events make the architecture cleaner and make the modding API more robust. So in a way, I've almost become more dogmatic about this as I've worked on the game.
xelxebar 7y ago
This is friggin cool. Definitely gonna check this out. By the way, I think there's a typo on the About page. Below the video, the game is called "Reset Hard". Guessing that's an earlier name?
- danShumway 7y ago
  Yeah, recent name change, still trying to track down all of the old references. :)
  - sharmi 7y ago
    There is one reference in your vcard when we subscribe the mailing list. There there is one on your patreon page. :)
ultrasounder 7y ago
This is god send for my Autistic son who singularly obsessed about space-time continuum these days. He was even looking for games along the same theme. Do you have a patreon or planning to have one? Perhaps we can have a side conversation on ways to support your effort. Last question, any definitive resource you can point to for a 11 year old to grok the concept of space-time mechanics and other fundamentals concepts before tackling the concept of time travel. Cheers!
- ultrasounder 7y ago
  EDIT:- Saw the Patreon link on the top right of the page. Thanks for creating this.
- danShumway 7y ago
  You're maybe the second or third person to mention to me now that this might be something that Autistic kids might be into. I'm not super-familiar with the Autistic community, so I haven't been consciously pushing in that direction, but I am definitely interested in making sure that the game is accessible for Autistic players, in no small part because the few Autistic kids I've playtested with have so far been really good at latching onto the emotional core of the game -- which is to try and build this puzzle-box of a world that just feels very safe and contained, where the more you learn about it and the more that you dissect it, the more the disparate systems start to fit together and make sense as a cohesive whole. On the resource side of things, take both of these with a grain of salt because I'm not an expert here, but I do have two recommendations. The first is that there are a few child-friendly movie-adaptations of Flatland out there, and my niece watched one of them in first grade and was really into it. Flatland indirectly inspired some of the mechanics in Loop-Thesis -- particularly this idea of time being a spacial dimension that you can hop around in and move objects into and out of, rather than the strict line of cause-and-effect that's more common in other games. Flatland was also partially the inspiration for meta-meta-time, which is how I reconcile the player being able to insert themselves into the game. The physical player exists in meta-meta-time, and is projected via their computer into meta-time, which is the actual game engine running on their computer. Then the game engine projects their avatar into the regular level timeline. The other recommendation I'll make is the game "Baba is You", which is not related at all to space-time, but is probably the closest example of the kind of mechanical consistency that I'm trying to hit with Loop Thesis, and it might scratch some similar itches.

jessehorne 7y ago

This is brilliant! If the game is anything like the picture you've painted in this comment, it's going to be remembered for a long time.

danShumway 7y ago
Thanks! If you're interested in this design philosophy of having almost radical consistency within a game's systems, I wrote a blog post early on in development about how that influences the way the game is coded. It's a little out of date; since writing it some of the mechanics have changed, but it still provides a good overview of what I mean when I say that nothing in the game is faked. https://danshumway.com/blog/design-is-implementation/ https://danshumway.com/blog/design-is-implementation/ Ironically, in this article I mention: > It's possible to take this philosophy too far. When I first started building an update system for entities within the world, I experimented with using events and special methods to pass around information... I still use events, but only when it makes sense to do so. The current rewrite I'm working on is going in the opposite direction here, relying much more heavily on events and only using direct object references when its absolutely necessary. This is, again, to make gameplay more consistent; but also just because events make the architecture cleaner and make the modding API more robust. So in a way, I've almost become more dogmatic about this as I've worked on the game.

xelxebar 7y ago

This is friggin cool. Definitely gonna check this out. By the way, I think there's a typo on the About page. Below the video, the game is called "Reset Hard". Guessing that's an earlier name?

danShumway 7y ago
Yeah, recent name change, still trying to track down all of the old references. :)
- sharmi 7y ago
  There is one reference in your vcard when we subscribe the mailing list. There there is one on your patreon page. :)

ultrasounder 7y ago

This is god send for my Autistic son who singularly obsessed about space-time continuum these days. He was even looking for games along the same theme. Do you have a patreon or planning to have one? Perhaps we can have a side conversation on ways to support your effort. Last question, any definitive resource you can point to for a 11 year old to grok the concept of space-time mechanics and other fundamentals concepts before tackling the concept of time travel. Cheers!

ultrasounder 7y ago
EDIT:- Saw the Patreon link on the top right of the page. Thanks for creating this.
danShumway 7y ago
You're maybe the second or third person to mention to me now that this might be something that Autistic kids might be into. I'm not super-familiar with the Autistic community, so I haven't been consciously pushing in that direction, but I am definitely interested in making sure that the game is accessible for Autistic players, in no small part because the few Autistic kids I've playtested with have so far been really good at latching onto the emotional core of the game -- which is to try and build this puzzle-box of a world that just feels very safe and contained, where the more you learn about it and the more that you dissect it, the more the disparate systems start to fit together and make sense as a cohesive whole. On the resource side of things, take both of these with a grain of salt because I'm not an expert here, but I do have two recommendations. The first is that there are a few child-friendly movie-adaptations of Flatland out there, and my niece watched one of them in first grade and was really into it. Flatland indirectly inspired some of the mechanics in Loop-Thesis -- particularly this idea of time being a spacial dimension that you can hop around in and move objects into and out of, rather than the strict line of cause-and-effect that's more common in other games. Flatland was also partially the inspiration for meta-meta-time, which is how I reconcile the player being able to insert themselves into the game. The physical player exists in meta-meta-time, and is projected via their computer into meta-time, which is the actual game engine running on their computer. Then the game engine projects their avatar into the regular level timeline. The other recommendation I'll make is the game "Baba is You", which is not related at all to space-time, but is probably the closest example of the kind of mechanical consistency that I'm trying to hit with Loop Thesis, and it might scratch some similar itches.