A New and Exciting Future

isoChronal Panic! is all about blazing new frontiers in game design, this desire to do something new was at the heart of decision to develop the game for smart phones like Android and the iPhone. By working with these new platforms, we have to work within the constraints these new technologies bring with them in the early days of their development, as well as take advantage of the new possibilities they offer.

As I mentioned earlier, isoChronal Panic! is being developed primarily for Android and iOS, and while we'll also releasing the game for regular browsers, our main focus is for mobile devices. This means utilizing touch controls, and deciding exactly how to use the touch screen was a challenge in and of itself. We considered several different control schemes: having the player drag their finger across their desired path, a little pop up control pad, or even a simple grid system. In the end, we settled on a simple touch to move mechanic; the player just touches where they want to go,and Dan Guymore will go there on the straightest possible line. This seemed the most intuitive use of the touch screen technology, allowing the player to direct his character with a minimal number of inputs, and because the player taps where they want to go with their finger they'll know exactly where they're going after inputting a command.

While ease of use for the player is one of the benefits of working with smart phones, they also have their own particular issues. For example the iPhone does not allow browser based games to preload sound into a game, and only allows for one channel of sound at a time. This makes adding sound into our game a bit tricky, we have to figure out a way to play some manner of melodious sound in the background, while also interrupting that sound to add in sound effects that give the player auditory ques that they, for example picked up the Timetanium and should proceed to the exit portal. Nobodies figured out how to do this yet, most iOS developers have to go through the Apple Store to access Apple's tools to handle sound, or just do without sound for browser based games.We're hoping to get around this hurdle by thinking around corners. While all the details aren't sorted out yet, we've got a few tricks up our sleeves. To get around the preloading problem, instead of music being made up of one large sound file preloaded at the beginning on load up, sound will be broken into several extremely small snippets perhaps individual MIDI notes that will load in real time. The background music, instead of being a specific composition, sounds will be played based on an algorithm related to the players position, and how close the player is to temporal copies of himself. We're still working out the details, but we're pretty close to something no one has ever done before, and that is what we're after with this project.