

Why are there so few games that manipulate time and/or space in interesting ways? - amichail

Portal and Braid come to mind.  There's also an upcoming time travel RTS.  But why are there so few such games?
======
zkarcher
Have you tried developing one? ;)

In my experience, unusual game mechanics breed terrible edge cases. It's
difficult to handle these gracefully and consistently. I'm developing a new
Flash game called Toaster Bro: [http://blog.zacharcher.com/2009/03/20/toaster-
bro-alpha-10-d...](http://blog.zacharcher.com/2009/03/20/toaster-bro-
alpha-10-days-later/)

The basic concept is simple: you have a magic wire. You plug outlets together
to produce various effects. Hopefully it's not evident to the casual user, but
this has been extremely difficult to smooth out. There are many types of
outlets (not just electricity); wires can stretch between rooms (but only the
player's room receives tick events, so the toaster rooms trap you inside,
preventing you from remotely plugging in the toaster); there's a full
scripting engine but you still have to handle all the state changes, ...

To keep this game simple, I made an early compromise: only one disconnected
wire is allowed at any time. If you start drawing another wire, the original
vanishes. Otherwise it becomes a topological nightmare, as users want to
connect the loose ends of 2 wires, it's just very confusing to play, or
understand what's happening.

A friend asked me if I could put logic gates in the game. This is probably
superfluous (couldn't you just run electricity to the final destination?) but
this could be used to break the system, because you can plug electricity into
the logic gate's output. What now, bitches?! So you need even more rules,
then.

Also I think basic "warfare" games are easier to contemplate, because we're
all familiar with throwing pellets at our grade school friends, and whatnot.
Most of us didn't grow up warping the fabric of time and space, so it's hard
to think in that context ;)

