The Absence Theory; or, “Where Are All The Time Travellers?”

The most compelling evidence for the impossibility of Time Travel has always been the complete lack of people from the future, when such things will inevitably come to exist.

With the advent of Chronoportology, it became clear that the reason for a lack of travellers from the future was to do with the availability of information, or lack thereof. As the destination of a time jump required accurate, specific information, the earliest jump date possible was generally around the time that Chronoportology itself was invented. In many minds this rendered time travel largely useless, but helped guard its integrity from some forms of abuse by unscrupulous individuals.

In any case, the act of Chronoporting is not something undertaken lightly; involving a gravitas and severity that was previously associated with the deployment of nuclear warheads. Each ship is made to withstand the intense warping and fracturing of no more than one return journey, with one notable exception; the Temporal Navigator Novodantis.

A Demo of “Explorers”

Alright so the progress on Iron Skies is currently agonisingly slow, but this is mainly because I’ve been cooking up a quick portfolio project currently titled “Explorers” (well, that and Minecraft). It’s named after on a long, proud and (oh, surprise) unfinished lineage of Games Factory games I made well over twelve years ago. The premise was simply planetary exploration, although in this latest form your mission is more archaeological than recon.

You are an AP3 droid, remotely controlled from your ship to investigate dangerous worlds and collect clues, leading to a find piece of ancient treasure! It’s all done with a very old skool N64 feel, as I always wanted to do a game like that. A lot of the art is taken from a similar cancelled joint project undertaken last year. The main purpose of it is to show my ability to make art, code, sound and prose and meld them into a game pretty much autonomously. This is also one of the few ways a game designer can showcase the high-level application of game design itself.

So here’s an early version. [Link removed due to changes in the unity webplayer breaking pretty much everything]

  • Welcome to Nash! Feel free to explore.
  • See how many Clues you can collect (there’s 16 in all).
  • I don’t want it to get too complex, but there’s still some things I’ve yet to add to spice up the gameplay a little
  • Not to mention fix several bugs and replace some placeholders

Please have a go and tell me what you think! I will try to update it as I go, and of course get right on to Iron Skies.

Explorers screenshot

Play Explorers Web Demo v1

Quick note on the music: I’ve used some bgm from an old game for now as this is only a quick webplayer demo. It will be replaced as a priority, but right now I don’t think anyone will care; it just sounded odd with only sound effects. If it causes a huffle I’ll take it down of course, but geez, come on.