On time

I write a lot about time, and it seems like a good subject to write about, as it seems that it is the human condition to be obsessed with time. We live our lives calculating how long we have to complete a task, or how long it is until the next task arrives to complete. We are a race obsessed with time. Even the word 'race' which we use as a classification has time built into it.

With such a heavy emphasis that time has on our lives, I find it interesting that it isn't used as frequently in games as one would think. Sure there a puzzle games where you have to complete the puzzle before a timer runs out, and there are games where you have to do a timed trial or race, but what about in the aspect of narrative in games.

I haven't been working on game design for a while, because, hey you guessed it, I haven't had the time. But when I started designing the Wrath of the Scarecrow series back in 2007, time was put in as a major influence to the flow of the story. The game world would be setup to have triggers executed to carry the game in a different direction if a player was not in the right place at the right time. It is a very complex system that calls for dynamic branching that I have yet to experience in a game.

As I'm longing to get back to game development, I'm beginning to think more about specific elements that went into some of my designs that I would like to begin testing once Troglodyte is in a stable state, that can prototype and test out these ideas. If anyone has any good examples of time usage in a game, I'd love to check the out.

Later.

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Building an editor takes time. It has been taking me a while up until recently. I guess I really haven't spent that much time on it up to this point either, but it's becoming more pressing as the engine moves along. Design has been rather slow, but things will be picking up this week. I took some time off from game development, about a week, after having to drop out of said competition mentioned in the previous post.

It did give me some interesting ideas to continue to move things along however, so it was not all in waste. I think I'm going to continue to make the game I started developing resources for during the competition as I develop the editor as well. This way I can hopefully find any bugs that may come along and have something to keep me busy as I work on back end python scripting for the engine. I hope to have that and the editors GUI and menu's finished by the end of next weekend.

I haven't been working on Wrath of The Scarecrow the last week either and one of the books I ordered from amazon was canceled so I'm still waiting on some material. I'll start back to work designing WOTSC tomorrow as well.