Time Power Showcase

Worldline » Devlog
4 years ago by Tezemi (@te_ze_mi)
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Just uploaded a new video showing off all of Worldline's time manipulation abilities! Worldline features six different ways to manipulate time, referred to as "essence." For the final release of the game, we plan to introduce these to the player to these more slowly over the course of the game, but for the demo, we wanted the player to be able to experiment with all of them. We've worked really hard to balance each one, trying to ensure every power has its fair share of use as you play the game.

When we first started development, we had ideas for having six unique powers, but weren't exactly sure on how to implement each of them. In the very first versions of Worldline's pre-alpha stage, there were certain mechanics that we implemented early on, but almost immediately scraped. For example, essence had to be picked up directly after killing an enemy, as opposed to it simply flying to you. On top of that, each power required 100% of your essence meter to be full before it could be used, and when used, it would fully drain until it was at 0%.

Here's a really old gif showcasing this functionality
Each power themselves also went through their own stages of revisions. Pause, slow, and fast-forward were really easy to get right the first time, due to their simplicity. Record and reset, however, were not only difficult to balance, but also went through many, many serious revisions before we decided on a mechanic that worked. For example, one of the first ideas we had for reset was that the player would be able to put down what essentially functioned as a save point, and then would "reset" back to it if they died. This was cool as a concept, but didn't work well when it came to playtesting. People would often never use the ability because they were scared they might waste it, or they would use it too early, or too late before the next save point, effectively making it useless.

When the player put down a "reset point," it would appear like this. They could then activate reset again to not only reset to the point physically, but also go back in time to that point.

If you'd like to know more about the game, here's a few links:

If you like the game, be sure to check out the Kickstarter! We have a few extra cheap reward tiers that will be closing soon!

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Worldline

A Game About Time in Space - Worldline is a 2D puzzle platformer where you can use six time-altering abilities.

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