The Game: Round 2

[koboshi]

Welcome to the second round.  (See this thread for info and discussion about The Game.)

  As per the vote (and subsequent coin flip) Samwise’s idea is the winner of round one.

The lone survivor of a quantum physics experiment gone wrong is a cat that wandered into the accelerator.  You.  Inexplicably blessed with the ability to travel freely through time (Quantum Leap style but within your own body) during the hours leading up to the accident, you are now the only one who can stop the universe from being annihilated, unraveling the threads of causality like so much yarn.  Mrow?

Round two describes the general gameplay of Samwise’s game idea.  I’ll say that again to be clear, Samwise’s idea, not yours.  Take the above game description as written in stone and in one page or less describe the major aspects of its gameplay.  If it's a puzzle game how does the puzzle work?  If it's a fighting game is it a 2-D, or 3-D, bloody, or tame?  If it's an FPS what weapons are there?  Etc. From now on It's going to be harder to differentiate your game from every other game submission, so be original.



 A quick recap of the rules:
1)  Your entry must be one page or less.
2)  Only one post per player.
3)  Only post submissions in this thread.
4)  Submissions will be taken until midnight Wednesday.
5)  The game described must be about the time traveling cat described in Samwise’s submission.

Fight!

[pxib]

It's an adventure game, like text adventures of old, but in a 3D (probably 3rd person, for ease of use and cinematic flair) with basic physics and simple, quirky AIs for the physicists, engineers, and janitor who populate the lab. As the cat the player can only carry one item in his mouth, and can only manipulate reality by pushing and batting objects, or by variously influencing the actions of the local humans.

The gameplay window is limited to the last 14 minutes of existence so the player doesn't shy away from starting over. The actions the cat must complete in that time take about twelve minutes, but at any time the player can "leap" back to any one of the up to 900 seconds preceeding the current moment, so they can take as long as necessary to figure out that ideal sequence of leaps, yowls, and pawpresses required to shut the accelerator down.

(Can we call the cat Schrödinger, or is that too obvious? Have the NPCs refer to him by different names -- "Erwin", "Ding", "Mr. S" -- so the players can puzzle it out and grin conspiratorally when they do.)

[ajax34i]

Pxib's idea, but modified:

Make it a 3D adventure / stealth game.  The physics and the cat's carrying capacity and how it interacts with the environment as specified by Pxib.

However, the sum of the actions that the cat must complete should be longer than 14 minutes:  let's say 20 in easy mode, 40 in average, and 90 in hard mode.

The game starts at T - 14 with one cat in the lab, and the player can go about doing whatever he/she wants to, to try to influence the outcome.  The player can choose to go back in time at any point, and when that's done, a new copy of the cat appears back in time and can do whatever it wants to, with the old copy of the cat shown going about its business.  Like in the Back to the Future movies, and seeing your old self, etc.  The game will record the actions and movements of each iteration of the cat, and replay them at all times, which should result in more and more cats in the lab, depending on how many times the player goes back.

A secondary goal of the game, then, is to not shock the humans by letting them see more than one cat in any room.  This is where the stealth part of the game comes in.  It is plausible deniability for the cat to be seen by two different humans in two different rooms at the same time, but if any one human sees two cats in the same room or area, they just lose it and it becomes impossible to interact with them anymore, which makes preventing the disaster exponentially more difficult.

[tazelbain]

The failed experiment released the Bandage Elfphes from their prison in the double-negaverse dooming the universe to fall into a  BDSM fan-service cliche.  Our protagonist, unable battle the Elphes himself, goes to various time periods in the past and future to learn powerful combat techniques and gather strange weapons.  Eventually working his way back to accident to defeat the villains.

The game consists of a series of levels for each time period.  Each level will have: A master that you appease with a series of inane quests so that they will teach combat moves.  A historical figure that can beat up.  A lady cat that you woo with a singing mini-game.  A mouse you can eat if you figure out its puzzle.  An opportunity to trigger an event in history that humans will take credit for (I.E. Our hero invents Disco)  And lots of things to collect.

Combat is action-y beat-em-up with slow-motion affects, aura power-up, finishing moves, cut scenes that are largely irrelevant because the strict leveling system determines how much the player can damage an opponent.

EDIT: Le Serpent Grammaire

[Krakrok]

(Blue screened the first time I wrote this.)

The game is setup in a graphical style like 'Yoda Stories' but the gameplay itself is more like Geometry Wars. You have a lunge attack and a slow motion time move.

Your name is Hawking the cat. You discover that an alien is what caused the quantum physics experiment to fail. Apparently the alien is attempting to ascend by accelerating to the end of the universe. The problem is that when an alien ascends it creates a black hole. The alien is attempting to ascend here on Earth. In order to do this the alien has searched far and wide for a species which has an independent and serene soul. The only species the alien was able to find within 50 light years is the domestic cat. The alien believes that if it can feed on enough cat souls that it will then be able to accelerate to the end of the universe and ascend.

However, being that the alien is a lazy bastard it has minions that it sends out to capture the cats and bring them back for the alien to suck out their souls. The minions have spread out around the Earth and in each major hub they have setup a single portal which teleports back to the alien. The minions bring the cats to the portals and the alien sucks their souls out through the portal. Your goal is to find, disrupt, and destroy all of the portals and saving your fellow felines before THE END.

The trick is that the portals have to be deactivated and destroyed simultaneously. In order to accomplish this you have to find each portal, travel back in time to the beginning, find the next portal, repeat, until you can deactivate all of the portals simultaneously. Once you deactivate all of the portals simultaneously they will invert upon the alien and it will cease to exist.

You track the minions back to the portals through various levels until you've found them all and then blam! you lay the smack down on his alien ass.

[dusematic]

The game is sort of like EVOO in that you have to travel back to a primordial world and alter the course of evolution to produce a less broken species that will succeed in not replicating the crisis.  Try to avoid an intelligent race of dog overlords if at all possible.  The game is focused on replayability, with each different type of creature approaching and seeing the gameworld in different ways.  Many unique endings.

[cmlancas]

A very open sandbox game where simplicity is truly the key. Think Ecco the Dolphin simple. Perhaps you are granted one attack, but the game is mainly focused on thinking and less on hack n slash. Puzzles are mainly the primary function of moving the action in the game, where a player must use his abilities of stealth, jumping, clawing, purring, meowing, etc, etc, to solve puzzles. Player-Environment interaction is what the game attempts to master.

Different usages for each skill:

Picking things up in one's mouth: The cat can carry different items in his mouth to move them about the map. Combined with stealth, this opens many opportunities for development.
Stealth: Obviously sneaking around is going to be part of the arsenal for the cat, but let's not make it a SC/Assassin's Creed ripoff here.
Clawing: Sometimes the air-duct just needs a good ripping to get through. The cat must have some sort of brute force for the player to use.
Jumping: Cats can jump an uncanny distance. This will make 3D maps more interesting as a player can reach any part of the map at any time (generally) without much trouble.
Purring: Manipulation of human NPCs could possibly be of use to the cat. Maybe the player cannot get the door open to the outside world without the help of a human.
Meowing: Mainly a method of distraction. Think of the "What's that!" from SC.

Since this game is such a sandbox experience, the player can do anything he/she wants inside the game (since the game is based around a few hours), and with the ability to jump through time, no decision is final. The game will more or less auto-save every fifteen minutes so the cat can backtrack in time.


Edit: I thought of climbing too. A cat could climb using claws.

[sinij]

Sidescroller with some minor puzzles, think Lost Vikings but with a cat. You can jump, spit hair ball and claw things and you collect test-tube beakers to complete level. Power-ups are yarn balls. Bad guys are quantum fluxes, nerdy scientists and traveling voltage arcs. End boss is Janitor that caused accident by tripping over some cord.

[Nonentity]

The main gameplay swing is that you play the cat from a third person perspective, in a puzzle-based platformer. You must travel back in times to key inventions that cumulatively resulted in the invention of the device which caused the undoing - such as, these inventions would be created at another date no matter what, but the sequence as it exactly occurred had to be changed in order to keep this event from happening. It ranges from the harnessing of power (colonial times) up through more modern eras (possibly through the 40s, 60s, and so on). The feel of the game would be somewhat half-serious and campy - think No One Lives Forever. You're never actually killing anyone, you're just causing goofy scenarios that make them never come up with the idea - flushing their thesis paper down the toilet, etc.

You ultimately don't want to be seen. People seeing an intelligent cat would throw off the propability meter, which is somewhat like a life meter, in that once it gets too full, it would be a game over scenario. The challenges would be unique to each gameplay era - as you move forward into more and more complexity, there are more ways of detection - cameras, sensors, security guards, and so forth.

You have the ability to commune with other animals, and they might want you to do various tasks for them, in which case you'll have an easier time getting the tasks in any given era done. The main task at hand can always be done without them, but each subsequent help from an animal might make it somewhat easier.

The final stage would be you trying to prevent the original scientist from coming up with the particle accelerator - based on how the previous stages went, there will be differences in the level, such as if the invention of the harnessing of power was successfuly delayed, instead of the machine being plugged into the wall, it's some big steam pot that produces energy, or something along those lines.

[bhodi]

* Very close over the shoulder third person puzzle solver done in a comic fashion similar to beyond good and evil. The close view is to be used to reinforce the idea that you are a small cat by giving a different perspective on a house/yard/location. A good comparison would be the middle levels of katamari darmacy in terms of size. You'll be looking up a lot.

* Time limit given for each level by a 'virutal' cat moving through the level at a fixed pace, your previous self from the initial timeline that you are changing. You must get to the end of the level before this cat does. This virtual cat, visualized by a transparent wispy version of yourself, gives comments and the initial mission objectives for the level (see below)

* Levels are divided up by critical events over the past several days, however the objectives are initially strange, unrelated, small changes, and completely unexplained. The objectives are given at the beginning of each level by a simple list, "I'll need to do this, stop this guy from getting his pizza for 5 minutes, etc." but the player does not understand how changing something so small may influence the end goal of avoiding annihilation. Gradually, as the levels progress, the objectives become clearer and clearer and build upon each other to a final conclusion in a butterfly effect sort of way.

* In the puzzles you will have to avoid careless feet, leap onto things (tables, chairs) that you can't see the top of, move things around, convince people to pet you, follow you, pay attention to you instead of something else. You can manipulate and carry items with your mouth, but only one at a time. No attacks, but items that you can use to increase your abilities are acquired along the way. Catnip to move faster, etc. Heavy use of scripted events that have timers that you must overcome (grab the thingy before it is trapped forever by a rube goldberg machine) are prominent. Restart checkpoints during the level are given by completion of these areas.

* You have 9 lives for health. When you get stepped on or somehow fail, one of them is lost. They are reset back to 9 from level to level, and can also be used to restart from a completed checkpoint at any time.

[Glazius]

Educational game/puzzler.

The accident gave you amazing powers, transcendental perception, and the ability to slide freely through time, up to a limited point in the past.

One problem.

You can't change anything. No matter how you strain at your past body it continues along the course, and no matter what you try none of the humans or other animals take any notice. This would be hell, if not for your ability to manipulate the fundamental constants of the universe.

Well, in your past self's immediate vicinity, anyway. And only one constant, gravitational attraction. And only for specific windows of time before the accident, because of the tachyon resonance caused by the cataclysm. You know you won't be able to stop things like this - but if you make the accident worse, you'll wind up with more power in the past and eventually be able to make it better.

Maybe.

The concept behind the puzzler is simple - slot some manipulation type into a specific time interval, and watch events play out. For the first few levels of the game you try to acquire new powers, one per level, by messing things up. Boost gravity to bring down, say, a hanging light at the wrong moment when you pass near it, and the experiment goes farther wrong and you end up back in time with more intervals to work in and another power - say, regulating radiant heat. Cool down the coffeepot and force a researcher to be absent at a critical junctiure making coffee, and get the power to regulate capacitance and cause electrical shorts, et cetera. As you go through the levels you may spot an odd negative image of a cat here and there - this is the final power you acquire, the ability to resonate yourself.

Once you get the peak of your power, things start getting a little more interesting. In addition to your resonant power putting you in two places at once, effects you drop into one time interval can resonate forwards or backwards in time, and your new goal is to stop the cataclysm entirely, one step at a time. You lose access to powers and time intervals gradually, and have to start relying on resonance effects to do things in time periods you can't access anymore.

There isn't just one possible solution for every level. Most notable is an alternate track of events that gives you a glimpse at the fundamentals of the research taking place and unlocks the potential for a separate ending. Usually the game ends with the crisis averted and you going back to being a normal cat, since the accident never empowered you. But the alternate ending lets you tweak the experiment so you're still empowered but the universe doesn't fall apart anymore.

--GF

[koboshi]

  Each level is one day, from waking up at noon, just after the creation of a quantum black hole, till the midnight experiment.  The experiment involves placing a particle on the event horizon of a quantum scale black hole and observing the resulting radiation.  When they do this however they cause the black hole to grow large enough to escape the quantum randomness that held it in check. It grows in power until mere moments after 12 the hole consumes the entire facility.  The team of three doctors is assigned the job of determining what particle to place in the device.  They will each chose a quark and the particle is determined by the combination of it’s three quarks’ states; Up, Down , Charmed, Strange, Top, and Bottom.  By messing with the doctors’ day you change the state of that scientist’s representative quark between the six states and by proxy the radiation that creates Cat’s powers.  However the states you can reach are predetermined mostly by the restrictions of the level (where Cat can go, who Cat can interact with).
  At various points in the day Cat may be either locked away in a pen, or petted into a stupor, sometimes against his will, sometimes because the player is done for the day and wants to skip to the experiment.  These are used to make the earlier episode/days shorter then the eventual 12 hours real time between waking and the experiment on the last day.  The power gained from each previous day is kept regardless of the outcome of the latest day’s experiment.

First Power: Mind Reading. Cat is able to read the mind of the occupants of the facility. This is given on the first level as it’s mostly used for exposition.
Second Tier Powers: gained in any order.
  Human Sight.  By rubbing against a human’s leg you get that human’s pov for a period, good for seeing passwords and pin numbers, as well as reading English text which makes no sense to Cat otherwise.
  Cat Writing.  If Cat can find a fitting surface, like say a couch, he can scratch information into it which will stay there permanently, even surviving resets. This is good for storing passes and pins through resets, so a pin that Cat could only see at the end of the night could be used earlier in the day.  (There will be no manual entering of info so players won’t be able to simply write the information down. Cat merely mimics the movements over keyboards he’s seen.)
  Telekinesis. By flipping over on his back and waving his legs Cat can move small objects that are in line of sight, good for unreachable keypads, door locks and making distractions.
Third Tier Powers: gained only after all the above have been gained.
  Path Marking.  By spraying pheromones on walls, paths can be made that humans will follow in their more absent minded moments. Paths don’t persist, however they can be saved for quick recall and reconstruction with Cat Writing.
  Bilocation.  Cat can be in two places at once but the effort of doing so means that neither Cat can use any powers until the power is stopped.  The effort also slows movement and makes Cat look particularly lazy.
  Invisibility. Cat can become invisible by toggling into stalking mode.
Final Power: Time/space jumping. When Cat finally unlocks this power the game changes from trial and error trying to create a perfect timeline where the black hole is closed by the experiment.

  All powers happen by projecting entropy from Cat’s body. This means that after using the powers Cat becomes colder, if Cat becomes too cold he will fall asleep and won’t wake till the next day (beginning of the day again).  This means that Cat must find heat sources to curl up in front of for a while from time to time. During the day this can be achieved by sitting on a sunlit window sill, but as the evening turns to night this becomes less effective and eventually the chill of night makes sills a hazard.  At night other sources must be used like humans, electronic devices and other machines that give off heat.

[Samwise]

The basic control scheme is FPS (from the ground-level POV of a cat, of course).  There is no (or very minimal) HUD, since there is very little combat.  Some of the FPS-style challenges the player encounters in the course of the game might include:

• Jumping/climbing puzzles (e.g. getting to an air vent by jumping/climbing between shelves and filing cabinets)
• Stealth (e.g. getting through an area you're not supposed to be in without anyone spotting you)
• Physics puzzles (e.g. knocking stuff over to make an area passable or disable a machine)
• Simple/one-sided combat (e.g. chasing and killing a rat, or biting a human on the leg and then running like hell)

The flow of the game resembles an adventure game more than a standard FPS, though; rather than going through a linear area and solving challenges in an obvious sequence, the player must explore the environment, work out the dependencies between different objects and events, and line them up one by one to complete the "puzzle".

The game world consists of a smallish area (several rooms) and a span of time on the order of an hour or two that is broken up into smaller segments (let's say one hour broken up into minutes). 

The state of each object and character in the game, including the player, is tracked across that entire span of time, like a series of savegames in a standard FPS.  The player is permitted to freely jump to and from any point in time (a bit like loading a savegame).  Actions taken in earlier points in time will automatically propagate to later points; for example, if the player jumps to 11:05, knocks over a glass, and then jumps to 11:15, the glass will be broken (or potentially cleaned up by an NPC, if an NPC with that behavior would have been present in the intervening time).

The player's overall goal is to manipulate pivotal events (I'll call them 'linchpins', after the game Chrononauts) in the game's plotline.  For example, if Dr. X and Dr. Y are alone in the breakroom between 11:10 and 11:20, a scripted event is triggered in which they have a conversation about modifying some parameters in the experiment (Dr. X is a corporate saboteur and is trying to dupe Dr. Y into creating a catastrophe).  This will lead to a linchpin at 11:50 where Dr. Y will fiddle with some settings if he's present at the control panel (which he will endeavor to be), culminating in a "YOU LOSE" at 12:00.  However, the player can undertake actions to alter the linchpin at 11:15, perhaps by distracting Dr. X and/or Y, or getting Dr. Z to happen by at a fortuitous time and overhear the conversation (triggering new linchpins later).

As the player witnesses certain linchpins, they are automatically added to a "timeline" display that the player can call up to get feedback on his progress (sort of like a quest journal in an RPG, or the auto-map in some FPSes).  When a linchpin is upset, this will be indicated by the creation of a new fork on the timeline (giving the player instant feedback that whatever he just did was significant) and everything that will now not happen being grayed out (this may invalidate actions that the player has taken in later parts of the timeline, in which case the player may have to do them again a different way).   Eventually, the player will flip a linchpin that causes the final event in the timeline to change from "YOU LOSE" to "YOU WIN" (e.g. the saboteur is discovered and the mistake corrected, ending the time loop), at which point the game is over, you're a normal cat again, there's a nice cutscene, and the credits roll.

If at any point the player "loses" (i.e. dies or hits the end of the timeline without fixing the problem), they're presented with the timeline screen and told to pick some point in the past to travel to.  There is never any need to start from scratch, no arbitrary cockblocking, et cetera.