Bay 12 Games Forum

Thousands of years into the future of the "ZC world", the world was engulfed in a never-ending civil war. It appeared that humanity would end up being extinct at its own hands. And while that may make for great gameplay, engaging storyline, and daring heroics, it would also lead to the end of humanity.

In come Dr. Zybourne. In an underground facility, safe from the constant zeppelin bombings, him and his team of dedicated scientists developed a time-traveling device. Dr. Zybourne planned to send this device back to the distant past, where it can slowly manipulate the Earth's climate, thereby speeding up human evolution. If human technology could progress at a rapid rate, maybe the more-advanced humans might be able to prevent the civil war from occurring in the first place.

When the scientists began to realize what Zybourne's plan was though, they rebelled against this mad scheme. They claimed that Dr. Zybourne would only be creating a "new" timeline, and thus saving a new 'human race', while the old 'human race' (which would include Dr. Zybourne and the scientists) would wind up getting erased from existence. Instead of saving "their" humanity, Dr. Zybourne would only just be killing it.

Future research however revealed that the scientists' conception of "time" was wrong. Instead of there being a single timeline that just gets "overwritten" periodically, the timeline exist as a series of disparate events, whose existence can be manipulated as detailed in Chapter 1. Since Dr. Zybourne's change won't lead to the erasure of humanity, the scientists withdrew their objections to Dr. Zyborune's plan and allowed it to proceed. Dr. Zyborune selected an already pre-existing Major Event to delete, and then shoved in his device into the timeline.

This device itself is "a large object with various time readouts on the front (hence the 'Clock' moniker), which will count the days, years, and millennia until the clock is back at the same moment it was sent, at which point it will deactivate"...by exploding.

The 'clock' itself proved to be a success; it did end up averting the specific disaster that Dr. Zybourne feared. But it poses its own problem. Its mere existence is proof enough that time travel can happen, and that somebody else can take advantage of it in order to change history...possibly even undoing the very change Dr. Zybourne made in the first place.

While the 'clock' did prevent the war from occurring, it does not prevent humanity from going extinct by some other method. In fact, the clock might even cause it. Suppose the clock decides to engage in major terraforming of the Earth's climate to be inhospitable to humanity, thereby speeding up human evolution. Human technology would be advanced, but humans would be unable to live in the newly hostile planet, and thus would quickly die off.

The game I plan on making will cast Sylus, an weapons research scientist who secured control over the 'clock', as the main character and "micromanager". He is supposed to use this 'clock' in order to change history and manipulate it, in the same way that Dr. Zybourne changed history to avert the "civil war". When he is done 'fixing' history, he is to be instructed to destroy the 'clock' so that nobody else can change history.

According to Dr. Zyborune, the clock is 5 stories high and 150 feet wide. That would imply that the clock is not really portable as a clock that is 5 stories high would be 54 feet tall, and Robert Wadlow, the tallest human ever according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is "only" 8 feet, 11 inches tall.

However, a certain drawing of Johnny "Five Ace" holding something that looks like a clock suggest that Dr. Zybourne's description might actually be incorrect, as that clock does not look like it's taller than any of the humans in that picture.

An alternative explanation however is that Johnny "Five Ace" is not actually holding the Zybourne Clock, but instead another priceless artifact called the 'Golden Egg', a model of the actual (non-portable) Zybourne Clock. The only knowledge I know of the Golden Egg however was it being referenced as a 'codename' in a Prelude chapter.

At the end of a long room filled with whispers and handshakes sits a man fondling a small, dark object.  ... "What you got there, mister?", queries the girl. ...

"This, my darling, is a device. A device many men and many women have died to see, to understand, and to own. In many ways it is like one of your toys, but a toy for adults. This, darling, is The Zybourne Clock."

Suddenly, barely visible in the dim light, the child's eyes change. ... "Orange Fox to Deitrus. Orange Fox to Deitrus. The Golden Egg has been located. I repeat, we've got it. Over".

In this "prelude", it is clear that the Zyborune Clock is the Golden Egg, and furthermore, that the Zybourne Clock is meant to be portable, as otherwise, that man fondling the small, dark object wouldn't call it the Zybourne Clock.

There is evidence in favor of the Zybourne Clock actually being five stories tall, but it is circumstantial. In a chat log between RexMeteorite and ASa8657416, Rexmeteorite described people actually "entering" the clock and messing around with its internal "clock operations", which suggest that it is indeed as tall as Dr. Zybourne says it is. That being said, the evidence in favor of the clock being small and portable is stronger, therefore...

I will assume that Dr. Zybourne was not very good at describing dimensions, the clock is not 5 stories high, and the clock is portable and easy to steal/use.

The Zybourne Clock comes with three fail-safes to protect it from being "taken over". Though one of these failsafes are actually pretty important for the actual ZC plot, I'll go into more detail in a separate post. I honestly find these failsafes rather useless and pointless, so I will disregard their existence.

First, the clock could fight by mimicking the combat style of the opponent it faces, though honestly, it's just a clock. Its fighting capabilities are going to be limited.

Second, Dr. Zybourne sent in a team of three people (including Dr. Zybourne's daughter, Maria) to protect and hide the clock's existence.  Those three people would try to manipulate human progress (through the creation of a religious organization called "The Order") in order to prevent the discovery of the clock and its capabilities. In addition, the descendants of those three people would have full access to the programming of the 'Clock', to be able to reprogram the 'Clock' at will if it becomes necessary to do so.

Coincidentally, the entire "playable party" is full of people who descended from these three people, so this failsafe quickly gets circumvented once the party finds the clock, and thus this entire failsafe becomes incredibly pointless. Also, the "playable party" is led by Sylus, who ends up in final possession of the clock anyway.

Third, if it detects that humanity has became so advanced that it could theoretically take over the 'Clock' itself and reprogram it, it will send out a distress signal to the descendants of Maria alone. When the scientists asked why, Dr. Zybourne points out that those three people who are going to be sent back in time are going to have children, and then they will have children, and so on and so forth, until there's pretty much countless numbers of descendants, so it makes sense to just limit it to just one line of descendants, so it become a less terrifying problem to manage...

It is this distress signal that plays a major role in Act 2 of this game, as it gets activated once the clock's defenses get compromised by Sylus. I'll talk more about this distress signal in a latter post.

The "Something Awful" forum is having a game development contest (called SaGameDev VII). Your goal is to create a game in two months; you have one month (June) to plan out your game, and one month (July) to actually create the game. I want to use this as an opportunity to try and...er...do something worthwhile, so I decide to enter, using this thread to "plan" the game out. I can't create any actual content yet for the game(that's for July), but I could do some "concept writing" to help me get ready for making the game. "Concept writing" would also be worthwhile in that it will allow for critiques of my 'concepts' beforehand.

The 'theme' for this year's contest is "Balls", so you must must a game that, in some way, shape or form, relates to balls. It just so happens that there happens to be an already pre-existing game idea previously on "Something Awful" that has "balls" play a minor role within it...Zybourne Clock, an "electro-punk" RPG that never got past the "concept art" stage. It suffered from the syndrome of "too many writers/artists, nobody to code". Well, they had a couple competent people. They were chased out of the Zybourne Clock project after criticizing it.

A main theme of this game is time travel, along with its rather unique interpretation of how "time" works. From the actual script of the game:

We theorized that when you send an object through time, it does not create a new timeline that overrides the current like we had originally thought. When the object enters the timestream, time begins to correct itself. Let me use this example: Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff. Time works the same way.

Since I like trying to resurrect old and abandoned game ideas and turn them into actual semi-decent games, I decide I might as well take this description of "time" and run with it, creating a "Zybourne Clock" game that focuses mostly on overriding timelines. Granted, I expect several other competitors within the game development contest taking the same idea, but I think I can probably stay true to the theme of "balls", and probably score more points that way.

Obviously, there's more to Zybourne Clock than just "time"; in fact the makers of Zybourne Clock envisioned an RPG that would last 100 hours, with many sidequests and characters. I'll have to address those other elements of the Zybourne Clock setting, which I will refer to in shorthand as the ZC World.

We theorized that when you send an object through time, it does not create a new timeline that overrides the current like we had originally thought. When the object enters the timestream, time begins to correct itself. Let me use this example: Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff. Time works the same way.

So before we can start anything else, we need to figure out how "time" actually works in Zybourne Clock. As time travel is essential to the ZC world, it's important to first figure out what it is. It's plainly apparent what it's not: creating a new timeline. There is only one timeline, and all you're doing is just tampering with it and then letting the timeline repairs itself afterwards. But, what happens when the timeline is "repaired"?

To understand what's going on, we have to draw a diagram.

Before Time Travel
1. Ball A
2. Ball B
3. Ball C
4. Ball D

Here's our four balls. Let's pretend that each 'ball' represents a major historical event within the ZC World; Ball A is the creation of a worldwide Church, Ball B is the formation of Rasenni nation, etc. The actual events themselves are arbitrary; what matters is that there can only be 4 of them. There cannot be any more major historical events within this timeline. The "cliff" can only hold 4 balls.

Introduction of Ball E
1. Ball A
2. Ball B
3. Ball C
4. Ball D
"5." Ball E

So what happens if we introduce a new "ball" (Ball E) to this cliff? Well...we accidentally created a new Slot 5 to hold Ball E, which just isn't supposed to happen on this "cliff". The "cliff" is supposed to hold only 4 balls. But the timeline is going to repair itself, meaning it'll destroy Slot 5, pushing Ball E into Slot 4.

But what about Ball D, which was already in Slot 4? Ball D gets displaced by the incoming Ball E, and it needs somewhere to go. So the timeline pushes Ball D into Slot 3. But this now it displaced Ball C. Ball C is pushed into Slot 2, displacing Ball B. Ball B gets pushed into Slot 1...displacing Ball A. Ball A has nowhere that it could be 'pushed' to though (as all the other slots have been filled with balls that have already been "relocated" from their original slots), so Ball A just "disappears".

After Time Repair
1. Ball B
2. Ball C
3. Ball D
4. Ball E

The erasure of Ball A from the timeline may be very important, or inconsequential. But note that Ball A may have very little to do with Ball E, and it was Ball E's mere existence in the timeline that caused Ball A to no longer exist. This means that anyone in the ZC World who wants to engage in time travel must take into account two things:
1) It is easy to erase a Ball/historical event that a time traveler does not like. All he has to do is push that Ball into Slot 1, by introducing brand new Balls (and new "Slot 5s") that will push that Ball up from his original slot all the way up to Slot 1. Then the next 'historical change' will lead to the Ball in Slot 1 to be quickly "erased".
2) It is difficult however to "micromanage" history in a direction a time traveler likes (implementing any change he wants, and then reverting it if he turns out that it is a terrible idea). Any change to the timeline will lead to a possibly unrelated Ball to be erased. Eventually, all the "original" Balls located within the timeline will rise up to Slot 1 and be ultimately eliminated. They will then be replaced by brand new Balls created by the time traveler, and by the time the time traveler gives up or finishes modifying history, the "ending" timeline may be unrecognizable from the "beginning" timeline.

The game I plan on making will set you up as a time traveling "micromanager", giving you the task of modifying the timeline by introducing new "balls" and manipulating the four 'slots'. This is ultimately the basic idea behind it, though I have to consider whether I want to 'score' players for having a "good" timeline, or if I want to make the game "freeform", letting the players fool around as though the 'game' is just a fun toy. (I also plan on having the players read a short description of the 'history' of the world, so that he knows what changes he has made to the timeline.)