Ghost Town

Originally, when the only idea we had for the game was the mechanic of time clones, we had a very different idea of what the gameplay would look like. For the setting, we envisioned a town which, at first, would be devoid of all life. The gameplay would revolve around the player populating the town with their past selves. One hop would involve the player going to various places and interacting with set pieces (or not), and on the next, a time copy would carry out those same actions. The working title we had for the game was 'Ghost Town.'

Needless to say, the concept changed a lot as we fleshed it out and discussed what sorts of things we might let the players do. In particular, we spent a lot of time speculating about how the players could interact with their past selves. We wanted the player and their time clones to be able to hand items off to each other; for example, the player could place an item in a square, and in a future hop they could return and (assuming their past version had already deposited the item) pick it up and use it for something. Or, the player could go to a particular square and press the button to pick up an item, so that they could later pass off any item they chose to the resulting time clone.

Inevitably, we began to wonder: what if you could kill one of your time clones? Discussion of this topic, and of the player's goal in the game, led us away from the idea of Ghost Town. The next phase of our game's design is a story for another post. Ghost Town could have been an interesting experience, if we'd gone through with it; it would have been more focused on art and creativity than gameplay, and it would have been much more experimental. But, as we never quite came up with a satisfactory goal for the player, it didn't stick. We could always try it out again later, but for now it's been put aside.