I doubt this is as relevant as it seems to me, but there is this timetravel strategy game called temporal: http://www.kaldobsky.com/audiogames/ (it’s toward the bottom of the page, and the main audience is visually impaired, hence the limited visual design).
The idea is that it is supposed to work similar to time turners, and the easiest way to lose the game is not by getting shot or crushed in security doors, but by losing track of previous instances of yourself and bumping into them to ruin the consistency of the timeline.
Of course, the developer didn’t get to the end of the game he had in mind, mostly because the final stage was supposed to be a conflict with an opponent who could also travel through time. I wound up trying to recreate it with a different engine (with the original developer’s permission), and got stuck at about the same point.
I also was able to create a paradox that didn’t trigger game over (in the original, not my reconstruction, though it works in mine as well). There is a part where you need to get an armed guard to shoot another guard, but nothing is stopping you from then going back in time and killing the armed guard before he could shoot the other… and this does not interfere with anything else you did that relied on the other guard being dead. It seems patchable, but still...
The developer’s strategy for the timetraveling boss AI, in as much as he told me, was to calculate where it could be within so many ticks, predict where it would move to, and have “future” instances spawn there. This doesn’t sound like it could take into account your actions (only how far you could travel spatially within x ticks), and doesn’t account for the fact that the only limits on your abilities are that you can’t travel back to before you last woke up, or later than has already occurred naturally. Oh, and it does prevent the sort of past/future interactions we see in HPMoR, or with the patronis in Prisoner of Azkaban. So you strictly avoid observing your future selves, while future you can observe all previous instances of you, provided the universe remains consistent.
So I suppose the difference here is that the timetraveler from the future is the one who experiences the results of the timetravel. Past you has to rescue future you before future you needs rescuing, but future you can do nothing for past you. So it’s what time turners would look like if the guidelines from the ministry of magic were strictly followed.
I might try to compute PoA type events by considering all timetravel-capable individuals, or individuals likely to become capable of timetravel within the limits of the ability, then calculate how they are most likely to react to a situation given foreknowledge… at which point this would be the outcome, and that individual would be required to have that outcome happen, or break temporal consistency. So if I knew of a timetraveler in vacinity of a life-threatening situation, and knew that said entity would try to prevent it if given the chance, I would calculate what they would be most likely to do, and make it happen. So in the case of Temporal, if I was, say, trapped in the presence of several armed guards that I did not believe I could escape, I might have the game try to calculate ways that a future instance could come to the rescue, and have it generate an instance to do just that, but then throw game over if you fail to make it happen.
This doesn’t strike me as complete, but I kinda want to try it.
This reminds me of a game/mod (called “Prometheus” IIRC) where you had to complete objectives within a fixed amount of time in a manner impossible to do alone, with guards to kill and multiple switches to press at the same time to open a door… but all you had for help was yourself, in five copies.
The game would basically let you play the first copy, end, play the second copy while the first played out what you had done previously, then the third while the first two kept repeating what you recorded, and so on, and then you could go back and re-do earlier copies to account for new actions taken by the later copies, all culminating in one big five-minute match between You^5 VS (Causally) Impossible Level. Think Portal 2 coop but with time-traveling copies of yourself.
(Apologies for length...)
I doubt this is as relevant as it seems to me, but there is this timetravel strategy game called temporal: http://www.kaldobsky.com/audiogames/ (it’s toward the bottom of the page, and the main audience is visually impaired, hence the limited visual design).
The idea is that it is supposed to work similar to time turners, and the easiest way to lose the game is not by getting shot or crushed in security doors, but by losing track of previous instances of yourself and bumping into them to ruin the consistency of the timeline.
Of course, the developer didn’t get to the end of the game he had in mind, mostly because the final stage was supposed to be a conflict with an opponent who could also travel through time. I wound up trying to recreate it with a different engine (with the original developer’s permission), and got stuck at about the same point.
I also was able to create a paradox that didn’t trigger game over (in the original, not my reconstruction, though it works in mine as well). There is a part where you need to get an armed guard to shoot another guard, but nothing is stopping you from then going back in time and killing the armed guard before he could shoot the other… and this does not interfere with anything else you did that relied on the other guard being dead. It seems patchable, but still...
The developer’s strategy for the timetraveling boss AI, in as much as he told me, was to calculate where it could be within so many ticks, predict where it would move to, and have “future” instances spawn there. This doesn’t sound like it could take into account your actions (only how far you could travel spatially within x ticks), and doesn’t account for the fact that the only limits on your abilities are that you can’t travel back to before you last woke up, or later than has already occurred naturally. Oh, and it does prevent the sort of past/future interactions we see in HPMoR, or with the patronis in Prisoner of Azkaban. So you strictly avoid observing your future selves, while future you can observe all previous instances of you, provided the universe remains consistent.
So I suppose the difference here is that the timetraveler from the future is the one who experiences the results of the timetravel. Past you has to rescue future you before future you needs rescuing, but future you can do nothing for past you. So it’s what time turners would look like if the guidelines from the ministry of magic were strictly followed.
I might try to compute PoA type events by considering all timetravel-capable individuals, or individuals likely to become capable of timetravel within the limits of the ability, then calculate how they are most likely to react to a situation given foreknowledge… at which point this would be the outcome, and that individual would be required to have that outcome happen, or break temporal consistency. So if I knew of a timetraveler in vacinity of a life-threatening situation, and knew that said entity would try to prevent it if given the chance, I would calculate what they would be most likely to do, and make it happen. So in the case of Temporal, if I was, say, trapped in the presence of several armed guards that I did not believe I could escape, I might have the game try to calculate ways that a future instance could come to the rescue, and have it generate an instance to do just that, but then throw game over if you fail to make it happen.
This doesn’t strike me as complete, but I kinda want to try it.
This reminds me of a game/mod (called “Prometheus” IIRC) where you had to complete objectives within a fixed amount of time in a manner impossible to do alone, with guards to kill and multiple switches to press at the same time to open a door… but all you had for help was yourself, in five copies.
The game would basically let you play the first copy, end, play the second copy while the first played out what you had done previously, then the third while the first two kept repeating what you recorded, and so on, and then you could go back and re-do earlier copies to account for new actions taken by the later copies, all culminating in one big five-minute match between You^5 VS (Causally) Impossible Level. Think Portal 2 coop but with time-traveling copies of yourself.
Perhaps some of the inspiration came from those?
This in turn reminds me of a wonderful platformer, Company of Myself
Ambitious. Keep working on it.