The beginnings of Timeshift
When we came up with the design of TimeShift, our only design constraint was the genre. We knew that we wanted to create a first-person shooter, but we also knew that we wanted it to be different from the slew of shooters currently in the pipeline. It is tough to compete and differentiate in a market with so many brand names, no matter how brilliant the implementation. We thought about things that could really set TimeShift apart from the pack of AAA shooters: Story? Nah, everyone can claim to have a unique story. Weapon and opponent design? They are important, but not in themselves enough to create a really different and innovative gameplay experience. So, what then? We needed to take it further, to do something that really changed the gameplay in some fundamental way. And then it came to us: Let's play with the idea of time manipulation and combine it with classic first-person shooting combat. If implemented the right way, we could really have something different on our hands. Now, when we say "time manipulation," we are not talking about Max Payne-style slow-mo that looks cool but has little gameplay applicability. We are talking about giving the player the ability to slow, stop, and reverse time while he continues to move around the gameworld in real-time.
OK, so we got it working, but is it fun? To make it fun we had to come up with compelling gameplay scenarios and in-game challenges to play around with. Once we got the time-manipulation prototypes working we were able to experiment, and the ideas began to flow. We started to come up with hundreds of ideas, many of which ultimately made it into the game: ideas such as, "Hey, let's steal weapons out of opponents' hands during time-stop." Or, "Let's allow the player to shoot stuff down, climb on it, reverse time, and defy gravity by riding the reversed objects back up to where they came from." Or, "Let's create opponents with guided missiles that track the player as he moves so that the only way to avoid the tracking is to stop or slow time and get the hell away." The more we thought about it, the more we tooled around with the prototypes; and the more we tested the gameplay, the more ideas we came up with. The key was that all the ideas had to operate under consistent rules, and after we had established these rules (how long each power lasted, how long it took to recharge the powers, and how the player could interact with the environment during the use of the powers), we were able to dig deeper into preproduction and create a complete game design. We then got a writer on board to assist us in creating a story around the gameworld and gameplay mechanic that we created.