ChronoCombat is a 3D, somewhat turn based, first-person strategy-shooter game where time is frozen, but only from your perspective.

It's super experimental, so we'd love to hear any feedback!

Check out the game here!

Inspiration

I've included descriptions of how to play in the game submission link, so I wanted to talk more about why we made this game, and why I'm really excited that it actually works.

This game came out of a very interesting philosophical idea: Imagine a world where you experience time in discrete slices. That is, imagine time "updates" every 10 seconds. If you drop your cup, you wouldn't see it fall. You would just see it frozen in the air for 10 seconds, and then see the debris on the ground.

If you walk up to your friend, by the time you get there, they might have already left their seat. You experience no motion other than your own. This is what this game is about.

The World

The way we created this in a game form is that we have players in an arena with the goal of shooting each other. A shooter was just the natural simplest mechanic, because when you see someone, you naturally try to shoot at where they are. But in this game, unless the other player stood exactly still, you will always miss if you do that.

Instead, you have to try and think about where this player is likely to move for the next 100 frames. So it becomes this very interesting mind game. How do you predict where other people will be in the next 10 seconds? Not just where, but how they'll get there. How do you move in ways that are difficult to predict?

We made the bullets ricochet with the hopes that that will constrain movement a bit. So if you see a bullet heading towards another player, you can guess that they will likely move out of the way in the next few frames. Things get really tense when something like this happens: