Travel Entropy

Travel Entropy began inside SUD01, our games division, as an original title for mobile and PC: a level-based, single-player puzzle platformer that puts time at the centre of both play and meaning. It's made for players who like to observe, plan and experiment, aged 16 to 45: students, young professionals, creatives and fans of indie games.

We wrote the story of Jerome Clockward, a late-Victorian scientist who blows up his own time machine and tears open a rift. Out of it comes his alter ego, the entity behind the chaos the player has to undo. The journey runs across five chapters, each with its own identity: a Prologue that shows the explosion, an archaic, monumental Antiquity, an industrial, steampunk Victorian Present, a technological and unstable Future, and the Singularity, inside the black hole the explosion created. The look is a black silhouette shot through with light, in strong contrast, mixing Art Deco and steampunk with cinematic touches against cosmic landscapes split by glowing fractures; animation is hand-drawn, with parallax and animation built into both the interface and the world. In every puzzle the player first watches the mechanism set in motion by the alter ego, then steps in with four time powers (rewind, freeze, speed up or slow down, decay or rebuild objects), all available straight after the tutorial but for a limited time that grows as you progress. To make it play well on a touchscreen we designed the Chain System: a pocket watch with four rings, one for each time phase, each given a power and a duration. The powers then fire in sequence on their own, leaving the player free to focus on movement.

Concept and game design are locked; pre-production, prototyping and content production are under way, with the prototype in GameMaker and the market version in Unity. Levels build step by step, from observation to combining powers to complex chains of cause and effect, and what you do in the puzzles carries into the platform sections that follow: mistakes and wasted time breed instability, so entropy becomes a rule of play, not just a theme.