4 ms·

A time travel strategy game

79 points by wavesplash 18y ago

davidbnewquist 18y ago
The time related gameplay elements shown in the videos struck me as extensive, entirely unprecedented and exciting. Wow!
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Not entirely unprecedented: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244594 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244594 But, of course, Chronotron is merely the time traveler's Donkey Kong, whereas this new thing is Starcraft. For people who are bored with regular Starcraft and have a desire to play n-way simultaneous Bughouse Starcraft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess
  - davidbnewquist 18y ago
    Good points, good links. True, this is a time traveler's Starcraft/Warcraft/Command and Conquer, etc. On the Achron website they state: "The company's innovation will create new sub-genres of games, starting with the game Achron." Achron is in the MTS sub-genre of RTS, to be pedantic:) However, the scope of differences in here make the term "sub-genre" seem unfair. The new time related gameplay will demand a huge new strategic skill-set from the players. I don't think this will be true for Starcraft II. And you won't be able to learn this skill-set by playing any of the "old-school" RTS games.
davidbnewquist 18y ago
The complexity of their game engine must be staggering...
- jerf 18y ago
  Not necessarily. While playing Braid, in the back of my head I was reverse-engineering the engine. It's a programmer thing. I'm sure you can all relate. :) Anyhow, if you come at this sort of program in the imperative mindset, it looks impossibly complicated. Imperative programs live in the now, constantly fiddling with their state with no ability to go back. But if you come at this from a functional viewpoint, suddenly it's not so hard; functional programs naturally live in a timeless way and the challenge there is to actually hook them up to reality in a meaningful way! Instead of recording the state and constantly mutating it, you record the inputs and replay them as needed. The engine will be entirely deterministic, so the game state can be freely rolled back and forth. And, here's the key: While retrofitting an imperative program to do this would be a nightmare, if you know what you are doing and you start with the understanding you need this, it's not so hard. You build a small test engine with the ability to do just one thing (maybe move units around), work out the necessary primitives, then start expanding the engine, maintaining the necessary properties as you go. You grow it from a small, maintainable seed. This is where, even though you can't go to school and take "mutatable chronology mathematics", it really helps if you have a lot of math under your belt, because you need to be thinking in terms of invariants and maintaining properties and other such mathematical things. Sitting down to just hack this out Will. Not. Work. Oh, I don't want to trivialize the accomplishment. This is the basic structure, but you're still going to encounter fundamental contradictions you need to work out how to resolve, and there will be tricky interactions that don't work quite right, and slight violations of some relevant property (that you may not even have fully understood or articulated) may manifest as some of the subtlest bugs you've ever seen (with their only saving grace being that they should be fully replicatable, in a system that basically has a time-traveling debugger). My point here is that while it is complicated and possibly the subtlest real-time strategy engine ever built, it is not as complicated as your imperative intuition is telling you. It's just fiendishly complicated, not impossibly complicated.
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    It doesn't even have to be fiendishly complicated. Each "time wave" is simply a different run of the simulation engine, with a differing set of inputs. The videos also explain how seemingly paradoxical situations, like units fighting alongside time-shifted selves are handled. The JWARS simulation engines built by the US Department of Defense (in Smalltalk, BTW) could handle theater-wide simulations down to the individual soldier level at 10,000X speed, and this was implemented in Smalltalk many years ago. Handling a dozen or two dozen "time waves" in parallel shouldn't be too much of a burden.
    - jerf 18y ago
      I called it "fiendishly complicated" in this case because even if the code is simple when written out, the underlying mathematics is tricky. A programmer off the street couldn't just wander up and modify it meaningfully in the way that a programmer can hack on the Quake III engine without breaking it; the slightest change could cause massive bugs, if you're not maintaining the invariants. The word "fiend" is chosen carefully :) The chronoporter is underspecified by the demo (which is not surprising and I do not mean as a criticism, buy the game to find out more). I can come up with several possibilities for how that works in game terms that match what we see in the demo, each with their own problems and benefits for the player.
      - stcredzero 18y ago
        What I'm talking about doesn't take any fancy mathematics. Earlier in this thread, someone else was talking about functional programming. You could do the same thing with OO, deterministic pseudo-random generators, and a few patterns like Action. All you have to do is support multiple time-shifted simulations in parallel, and you are mostly there. The complicated part is displaying "overlaps" but that is also not "fiendish." (And the game dynamics discussed in the videos would make that much easier.) What is truly clever is the introduction of the propagating "Time Waves" in the first place! Once you have that insight, such a game becomes easier to envision implementing.
        18y ago
Eliezer 18y ago
Chris used a neat strategy against me in a memorable free-for-all game between him, Konrad, and myself. I launched a massive surprise attack on Chris's mining base, so he traveled back in time, prepared a large fleet to counter my attack and succeeded. However, in the present I acquired nukes and sent a nuke back to the end of the battle that destroyed his remaining fleet. Before it was over, he jumped back further in time, moved his mining base and undid his counter attack. Since his fleet had left the area and my army had conquered it, my nuclear blast from the future decimated my own forces! Right at that time, Konrad came at me with his forces, so I didn't have time to undo my nuclear blast. Okay... I was skeptical... in fact I'm still skeptical... but this sounds awesome.
ivankirigin 18y ago
- "I go back in time, and kill the creator of this game" - "That's against the rules!" - "Not after I'm done"
patio11 18y ago
Holy cow. Just... holy cow. This is Dwarf Fortress levels of awesome. OK... close to Dwarf Fortress levels of awesome.
wavesplash 18y ago
I have no idea if it'll keep me intrigued long term, but the game blew my mind for an evening just thinking about game mechanics. The slow moving 'time waves'/windows are such an elegant solution.
DarkShikari 18y ago
I've always wanted this sort of thing, but given up on the idea quickly, thinking that time travel in a multiplayer game just doesn't make any sense and there's no sensible way to come up with a way to make the mechanic work. But it seems I was wrong. This is impressive and could open a whole new strategic dimension to RTS gameplay.
GrandMasterBirt 18y ago
Holy shit! First I thought how can this possibly work, I mean having two players playing at different time periods at the same time sounds iffy... but it looks like they might actually pull it off. Thats pretty cool since time progresses, just in modifiable ways. And what is awesome there is how the progressions are propagated via "time waves" So even though you might have died in the past, you can still fix it in the present and undo your demise. In any case we need to get some serious budget for these guys to work with :)
chez17 18y ago
You're forgetting Day of The Tentacle!
- kenver 18y ago
  You jsut brought back some old memories for me! DoTT was one of the first games where I really enjoyed the story.
gfunk911 18y ago
Ok, this looks awesome. I wonder how players will be able to manage the increasing complexity as a game progresses, but this definitely looks really promising.
- 10ren 18y ago
  I was thinking that too. One thing that helps is we allow the player to focus on the time travel gameplay rather than unit micromanagement by giving the units intelligence. You could create arbitrarily complex battles across the timeline, but in an ordinary RTS, you can also be overambitious, and not be able to manage everything you set out to do. Your real-world time in setting up position is also a limit they have in common. Of course, they add the complexity of managing paradoxes, but also introduce the limit of chronoenergy, which seems to have the effect of limiting how many units you can deploy across the timeline at once. hmmm... chronoenergy must be a time-global variable.
shader 18y ago
WOW. Just WOW. I have always believed that you can't have a good idea without someone else having it at about the same time, but this is the most uncanny experience I have had yet. I had this exact same idea in January, or at least a very similar one. Time waves, etc. Amazing. By the way, this is one of the reasons I don't like patents that much - what if I had patented "A real time strategy game with time travel elements using propagating time waves"? Then these guys wouldn't have been able to implement it, even though they obviously came up with the idea separately, and have spent more effort implementing it.
- shader 18y ago
  I should also have stated that in the reverse: What if he had patented the thing, when I have also independently created the idea? Looking over his curriculum vitae, it looks like he already has: "Patent Pending: Methods, systems, and computer program products for simulating a scenario by updating events over a time window including the past, present, and future. Submitted July 10, 2008." Oh well.
- davidbnewquist 18y ago
  The hypothetical scenario you describe would be tough for Hazardous software; however, they had the opportunity to do a patent search for related pending applications prior to investing any resources creating Achron. The Patent subsystem of our govt can serve a useful purpose for inventors and society in general. But as with nearly any system of this type, there are "corner-cases" for undesirable usage. A big problem is that someone can submit a patent and "sit on it" for years and years. A fallow patent provides no value to taxpayers. At best, the issue of the patent had a marginal cost for taxpayers, but at worst, there is a huge opportunity cost if commercial development of the invention yields value. Our patent system should demand inventors make timely, reasonable effort towards commercial development of their inventions. Kudos to the Achron inventor (Christopher Hazard?) for doing just that.
jimbokun 18y ago
If they ever get to the point of making this into a game engine, one of the first licensees will probably be the company making the official Lost strategy game. If the engine can handle the plot of Lost, it could handle anything.
t3knomanser 18y ago
Wow. I've actually been working on a board game that uses time travel as its mechanic: http://jetpackshark.com/recursed http://jetpackshark.com/recursed
p47 18y ago
Does anyone have any data how to become beta? I'll code for possibility of testing it:P?
Agathos 18y ago
The card game, Chrononauts, has been around a while already. On the other hand, you'll only be frustrated if you bring too much strategy to the table for that game.
- crowbar 18y ago
  If I recall, the only time I've ever been frustrated in that came is when someone kills and/or revives Hitler for the fortieth time. Still, I need to get that out again. Been a long time since I last played it.
10ren 18y ago
If you move a unit to a new location in the timeline-present, then go into the timeline-future... wait a little for it to propagate... then, when it appears, chonomove it to the timeline-past in the same location... wait a little while for it to propagate... and BOOM, it chronofrags itself. Lets say it 100% destroys itself (it doesn't in the video)... wait a little while for its absense to propagate into the timeline-future... now, when it arrives (and not before), there is no unit to chronomove into the past, and so the unit does not appear in the timeline-past... wait a little while for its absence in the past to propagate... And now there is no chronofrag to destroy that unit, and so it exists... and the cycle repeats. I like this time-paradox being resolved by becoming a cycle, due to the delay of propagation. (However, in a video they imply that you need to manually manage paradoxes, by chronomoving it to the timeline-past for each loop.)
- daemin 18y ago
  I think it might actually be interesting to be able to create time paradoxes. It would give a different dimension to guerrilla warfare for example by being able to set up traps in time and space. Though probably the hardest thing still left is to make it a fun game to play through, as it's quite easy to have a great idea but still make a crappy/average game.
  - 10ren 18y ago
    BTW: They say they do have time paradoxes. I agree with you that great idea does not necessarily mean great gameplay.
electromagnetic 18y ago
It strikes me that the key strategy in this game would be creating actions that are easily reversible. I wonder if resources travel in time with you too, because then the obvious strategy would be to create units as far back in time as possible so you can rush the enemy. I mean if you have a battle of 30 units vs 30 units and you win with like 2 units left, then you travel back in time and produce 10 more so the original battle was 40 vs 30. However, I'm sure the time traveling of units would be helpful if not risky. I mean what happens if you tele-clone a unit 5 times and the original gets killed? Well if you did that with your entire army of 30 unites, when that time wave hits the battle could switch to 6 vs 30. I can't wait for a chance to play this, the possibilities are astounding. It's so incredibly rare to get to play with a game this original.

79 points by wavesplash 18y ago

The time related gameplay elements shown in the videos struck me as extensive, entirely unprecedented and exciting. Wow!

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Not entirely unprecedented: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244594 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=244594 But, of course, Chronotron is merely the time traveler's Donkey Kong, whereas this new thing is Starcraft. For people who are bored with regular Starcraft and have a desire to play n-way simultaneous Bughouse Starcraft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess
- davidbnewquist 18y ago
  Good points, good links. True, this is a time traveler's Starcraft/Warcraft/Command and Conquer, etc. On the Achron website they state: "The company's innovation will create new sub-genres of games, starting with the game Achron." Achron is in the MTS sub-genre of RTS, to be pedantic:) However, the scope of differences in here make the term "sub-genre" seem unfair. The new time related gameplay will demand a huge new strategic skill-set from the players. I don't think this will be true for Starcraft II. And you won't be able to learn this skill-set by playing any of the "old-school" RTS games.

davidbnewquist 18y ago

The complexity of their game engine must be staggering...

jerf 18y ago
Not necessarily. While playing Braid, in the back of my head I was reverse-engineering the engine. It's a programmer thing. I'm sure you can all relate. :) Anyhow, if you come at this sort of program in the imperative mindset, it looks impossibly complicated. Imperative programs live in the now, constantly fiddling with their state with no ability to go back. But if you come at this from a functional viewpoint, suddenly it's not so hard; functional programs naturally live in a timeless way and the challenge there is to actually hook them up to reality in a meaningful way! Instead of recording the state and constantly mutating it, you record the inputs and replay them as needed. The engine will be entirely deterministic, so the game state can be freely rolled back and forth. And, here's the key: While retrofitting an imperative program to do this would be a nightmare, if you know what you are doing and you start with the understanding you need this, it's not so hard. You build a small test engine with the ability to do just one thing (maybe move units around), work out the necessary primitives, then start expanding the engine, maintaining the necessary properties as you go. You grow it from a small, maintainable seed. This is where, even though you can't go to school and take "mutatable chronology mathematics", it really helps if you have a lot of math under your belt, because you need to be thinking in terms of invariants and maintaining properties and other such mathematical things. Sitting down to just hack this out Will. Not. Work. Oh, I don't want to trivialize the accomplishment. This is the basic structure, but you're still going to encounter fundamental contradictions you need to work out how to resolve, and there will be tricky interactions that don't work quite right, and slight violations of some relevant property (that you may not even have fully understood or articulated) may manifest as some of the subtlest bugs you've ever seen (with their only saving grace being that they should be fully replicatable, in a system that basically has a time-traveling debugger). My point here is that while it is complicated and possibly the subtlest real-time strategy engine ever built, it is not as complicated as your imperative intuition is telling you. It's just fiendishly complicated, not impossibly complicated.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  It doesn't even have to be fiendishly complicated. Each "time wave" is simply a different run of the simulation engine, with a differing set of inputs. The videos also explain how seemingly paradoxical situations, like units fighting alongside time-shifted selves are handled. The JWARS simulation engines built by the US Department of Defense (in Smalltalk, BTW) could handle theater-wide simulations down to the individual soldier level at 10,000X speed, and this was implemented in Smalltalk many years ago. Handling a dozen or two dozen "time waves" in parallel shouldn't be too much of a burden.
  - jerf 18y ago
    I called it "fiendishly complicated" in this case because even if the code is simple when written out, the underlying mathematics is tricky. A programmer off the street couldn't just wander up and modify it meaningfully in the way that a programmer can hack on the Quake III engine without breaking it; the slightest change could cause massive bugs, if you're not maintaining the invariants. The word "fiend" is chosen carefully :) The chronoporter is underspecified by the demo (which is not surprising and I do not mean as a criticism, buy the game to find out more). I can come up with several possibilities for how that works in game terms that match what we see in the demo, each with their own problems and benefits for the player.
    - stcredzero 18y ago
      What I'm talking about doesn't take any fancy mathematics. Earlier in this thread, someone else was talking about functional programming. You could do the same thing with OO, deterministic pseudo-random generators, and a few patterns like Action. All you have to do is support multiple time-shifted simulations in parallel, and you are mostly there. The complicated part is displaying "overlaps" but that is also not "fiendish." (And the game dynamics discussed in the videos would make that much easier.) What is truly clever is the introduction of the propagating "Time Waves" in the first place! Once you have that insight, such a game becomes easier to envision implementing.
      - 18y ago

Eliezer 18y ago

Chris used a neat strategy against me in a memorable free-for-all game between him, Konrad, and myself. I launched a massive surprise attack on Chris's mining base, so he traveled back in time, prepared a large fleet to counter my attack and succeeded. However, in the present I acquired nukes and sent a nuke back to the end of the battle that destroyed his remaining fleet. Before it was over, he jumped back further in time, moved his mining base and undid his counter attack. Since his fleet had left the area and my army had conquered it, my nuclear blast from the future decimated my own forces! Right at that time, Konrad came at me with his forces, so I didn't have time to undo my nuclear blast. Okay... I was skeptical... in fact I'm still skeptical... but this sounds awesome.

ivankirigin 18y ago

- "I go back in time, and kill the creator of this game" - "That's against the rules!" - "Not after I'm done"

patio11 18y ago

Holy cow. Just... holy cow. This is Dwarf Fortress levels of awesome. OK... close to Dwarf Fortress levels of awesome.

wavesplash 18y ago

I have no idea if it'll keep me intrigued long term, but the game blew my mind for an evening just thinking about game mechanics. The slow moving 'time waves'/windows are such an elegant solution.

DarkShikari 18y ago

I've always wanted this sort of thing, but given up on the idea quickly, thinking that time travel in a multiplayer game just doesn't make any sense and there's no sensible way to come up with a way to make the mechanic work. But it seems I was wrong. This is impressive and could open a whole new strategic dimension to RTS gameplay.

GrandMasterBirt 18y ago

Holy shit! First I thought how can this possibly work, I mean having two players playing at different time periods at the same time sounds iffy... but it looks like they might actually pull it off. Thats pretty cool since time progresses, just in modifiable ways. And what is awesome there is how the progressions are propagated via "time waves" So even though you might have died in the past, you can still fix it in the present and undo your demise. In any case we need to get some serious budget for these guys to work with :)

chez17 18y ago

You're forgetting Day of The Tentacle!

kenver 18y ago
You jsut brought back some old memories for me! DoTT was one of the first games where I really enjoyed the story.

gfunk911 18y ago

Ok, this looks awesome. I wonder how players will be able to manage the increasing complexity as a game progresses, but this definitely looks really promising.

10ren 18y ago
I was thinking that too. One thing that helps is we allow the player to focus on the time travel gameplay rather than unit micromanagement by giving the units intelligence. You could create arbitrarily complex battles across the timeline, but in an ordinary RTS, you can also be overambitious, and not be able to manage everything you set out to do. Your real-world time in setting up position is also a limit they have in common. Of course, they add the complexity of managing paradoxes, but also introduce the limit of chronoenergy, which seems to have the effect of limiting how many units you can deploy across the timeline at once. hmmm... chronoenergy must be a time-global variable.

shader 18y ago

WOW. Just WOW. I have always believed that you can't have a good idea without someone else having it at about the same time, but this is the most uncanny experience I have had yet. I had this exact same idea in January, or at least a very similar one. Time waves, etc. Amazing. By the way, this is one of the reasons I don't like patents that much - what if I had patented "A real time strategy game with time travel elements using propagating time waves"? Then these guys wouldn't have been able to implement it, even though they obviously came up with the idea separately, and have spent more effort implementing it.

shader 18y ago
I should also have stated that in the reverse: What if he had patented the thing, when I have also independently created the idea? Looking over his curriculum vitae, it looks like he already has: "Patent Pending: Methods, systems, and computer program products for simulating a scenario by updating events over a time window including the past, present, and future. Submitted July 10, 2008." Oh well.
davidbnewquist 18y ago
The hypothetical scenario you describe would be tough for Hazardous software; however, they had the opportunity to do a patent search for related pending applications prior to investing any resources creating Achron. The Patent subsystem of our govt can serve a useful purpose for inventors and society in general. But as with nearly any system of this type, there are "corner-cases" for undesirable usage. A big problem is that someone can submit a patent and "sit on it" for years and years. A fallow patent provides no value to taxpayers. At best, the issue of the patent had a marginal cost for taxpayers, but at worst, there is a huge opportunity cost if commercial development of the invention yields value. Our patent system should demand inventors make timely, reasonable effort towards commercial development of their inventions. Kudos to the Achron inventor (Christopher Hazard?) for doing just that.

jimbokun 18y ago

If they ever get to the point of making this into a game engine, one of the first licensees will probably be the company making the official Lost strategy game. If the engine can handle the plot of Lost, it could handle anything.

t3knomanser 18y ago

Wow. I've actually been working on a board game that uses time travel as its mechanic: http://jetpackshark.com/recursed http://jetpackshark.com/recursed

p47 18y ago

Does anyone have any data how to become beta? I'll code for possibility of testing it:P?

Agathos 18y ago

The card game, Chrononauts, has been around a while already. On the other hand, you'll only be frustrated if you bring too much strategy to the table for that game.

crowbar 18y ago
If I recall, the only time I've ever been frustrated in that came is when someone kills and/or revives Hitler for the fortieth time. Still, I need to get that out again. Been a long time since I last played it.

10ren 18y ago

If you move a unit to a new location in the timeline-present, then go into the timeline-future... wait a little for it to propagate... then, when it appears, chonomove it to the timeline-past in the same location... wait a little while for it to propagate... and BOOM, it chronofrags itself. Lets say it 100% destroys itself (it doesn't in the video)... wait a little while for its absense to propagate into the timeline-future... now, when it arrives (and not before), there is no unit to chronomove into the past, and so the unit does not appear in the timeline-past... wait a little while for its absence in the past to propagate... And now there is no chronofrag to destroy that unit, and so it exists... and the cycle repeats. I like this time-paradox being resolved by becoming a cycle, due to the delay of propagation. (However, in a video they imply that you need to manually manage paradoxes, by chronomoving it to the timeline-past for each loop.)

daemin 18y ago
I think it might actually be interesting to be able to create time paradoxes. It would give a different dimension to guerrilla warfare for example by being able to set up traps in time and space. Though probably the hardest thing still left is to make it a fun game to play through, as it's quite easy to have a great idea but still make a crappy/average game.
- 10ren 18y ago
  BTW: They say they do have time paradoxes. I agree with you that great idea does not necessarily mean great gameplay.

electromagnetic 18y ago

It strikes me that the key strategy in this game would be creating actions that are easily reversible. I wonder if resources travel in time with you too, because then the obvious strategy would be to create units as far back in time as possible so you can rush the enemy. I mean if you have a battle of 30 units vs 30 units and you win with like 2 units left, then you travel back in time and produce 10 more so the original battle was 40 vs 30. However, I'm sure the time traveling of units would be helpful if not risky. I mean what happens if you tele-clone a unit 5 times and the original gets killed? Well if you did that with your entire army of 30 unites, when that time wave hits the battle could switch to 6 vs 30. I can't wait for a chance to play this, the possibilities are astounding. It's so incredibly rare to get to play with a game this original.