Clockwork Games and Time Loops

Hi, I’m Mark Brown and this is Game Maker’s Toolkit. Most video games have a very strange sense of time, if you really think about. There are day and night cycles with sunsets and sunrises. And some characters go to bed when it’s dark and get up when it’s light. But in general, time stands still - with characters stuck in a bizarre stasis until you make some kind of action. So the bad guys of Gotham City will dutifully wait for Batman to finish up his side missions before causing anymore carnage, and kidnapped characters will sit tight until you get around to rescuing them.

But there are a few games that decide to do something different and actually simulate events in real time - with characters moving on schedules, and events playing out automatically at set moments. I want to call these “real-time games”, but that’s a bit confusing. So let’s call them clockwork games, instead. And it turns out that there are some striking benefits to this approach. Over the summer, I played through Outer Wilds which is an interstellar archeology game where you bounce between planets in a rickety wooden ship, seeking answers about your miniature universe.

And what makes this game truly special is the way the entire solar system is constantly changing as time goes on. Take this pair of planets, which is known as the hourglass twins. At the start of the game, the Ash Twin is covered in a thick layer of impenetrable sand. While on the Ember Twin, you can explore a network of underground tunnels. Over time, though, the sand shifts from one planet to another, permanently closing off the tunnels on Ember - but revealing a bunch of towers on the surface of Ash.

Likewise, the planet of Brittle Hollow starts off intact, but slowly disintegrates as it gets sucked into a black hole. And a wandering comet makes its merry way around the solar system. This has some fascinating ramifications. For one, as the Outer Wilds devs have said, this adds an extra dimension to exploration by making “when” players explore just as important as “where”. You can’t only think about the world in a spatial sense, but also have to consider it in a temporal sense as areas you want to explore might be blocked off by the time you reach them, while others might not be accessible until much later on.

The other advantage is that it makes the world feel natural and dynamic, because the world is always changing. Of course, open world games do see changes - Megaton can be wiped off the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3, and Tarrey Town can be built from the ground up in Breath of the Wild. But these things always happen in response to choices and decisions that you make. Instead, by having things follow a clock, the world moves on regardless of your choices, progress, or even your existence.

If Outer Wilds wanted to capture the cosmic indifference of the universe, following a clock was definitely the best way to do it. Another series that works in real time is Dead Rising. In these games, or, at least, the good ones - you’re constantly watching the clock, as events happen at specific times - and will go on without you if you’re not paying attention to your watch. Some events are missable - like survivors who call out for help, but get eaten by zombies if you’re not fast enough.

Others are more critical, like how you need to give Stacey a top-up of Zombrex every 24 hours. And so, despite being a game about brain-eating, undead monsters, Dead Rising manages to make the clock your most nightmarish monster. Time pressures add a sense of urgency and peril to proceedings because you can’t just get around to saving survivors when you feel like it - you’ve got to get to them now. And choosing to save one person over another actually has consequences, because there literally isn’t enough time to save both.

This turns time into a valuable resource, which must be carefully managed just like ammo and health. Darting into a shop to explore for resources might be a smart move, or it might be a time-wasting detour. And learning routes, shortcuts, and memorising fast-travel points can really help you maximise your minutes. Every decision you make matters because you’re always spending your most precious currency: time. The thing about making a clockwork game, though, is that time can’t exactly go on forever.

Developers can’t just endlessly simulate events and character schedules. And certain events simply can’t be missed if you want to create a coherent story. And so most of these games have some kind of fixed end point. After playing Outer Wilds for 22 minutes, the sun goes supernova, and destroys everything in sight. In Dead Rising, Frank’s helicopter will return after 72 hours - 6 hours in real world time. And in Majora’s Mask - which is perhaps, the quintessential clockwork game - the moon will crash into the earth in three days time - about an hour of real world time, on the default speed.

And at that point, the most common thing to do is to take inspiration from the movie Groundhog Day and just make time loop back around to the start. Hi, I’m Mark Brown and this is Game Maker’s Toolkit. Time loops can be a very clever gameplay system. Take The Sexy Brutale, which is a murder mystery game that is set in a hotel that runs on predictable clockwork schedules. In the very first part of the game, Reginald Sixpence is shot and killed with a rifle, by a mysterious masked man.

But when time loops back around, you can plop a blank cartridge into the gun - providing the knock-on effect of saving Sixpence’s life. So the loop becomes a key part of the gameplay structure, as you learn information over repeated viewings of the murder, and then throw a spanner in the works by manipulating the scene at the exact right point in time. The time loop presents a clockwork puzzle to solve, which is all about learning a sequence of events, and then using that information to your advantage.

A similar system exists in the Shakespearean clockwork adventure game, Elsinore. Here, you play as Ophelia and over the space of a few days, Hamlet kills your father, and a mysterious assassin ends your life. Luckily, time loops back around. And this time, armed with foreknowledge of what’s going to happen and a handy timeline menu screen, you can convince and manipulate characters to do different things. In this loop, I gave Hamlet evidence of his mother’s infidelity, and his uncle’s murderous confession - which ended with Hamlet being killed in a duel against the king - and my father’s safety.

It’s not just the clockwork puzzle that endeared me to the game, though: I realised that the safety net of the time loop gave me the freedom to experiment with all sorts of approaches and ideas. Because if they didn’t quite work, well, I’ll just try again in a few minutes - and maybe with some handy new knowledge to use in future playthroughs. In other games, the loop is something to be mastered and maximised. In Minit, the time loop is the shortest of all: just sixty seconds, and definitely not long enough to complete an entire Zelda-like adventure game.

But by creating new start points, finding new tools, opening up shortcuts, and speedrunning across the map, you’ll eventually be able to finish the game within that minute-long loop. Similarly, there’s the under-the-radar Metroidvania Vision Soft Reset, where you’re given just 20 minutes to save a planet from destruction. Here, checkpoints act like bookmarks on a timeline: instead of fast travelling around the map, you’re actually rewinding time to earlier moments in your adventure.

Some stuff comes with you, like new abilities and passwords. Other stuff, like extra heart containers, don’t survive the rewind, and must be picked up anew if you want them. Part of the thrill of the game is carefully maximising the creation of new bookmarks. For example, at one point in the game i ventured deep within the planet to power up a machine, and then worked my way back up to the surface. All in all, the round trip left me with just 12 minutes to spare, which would make the rest of the game a bit of a tight squeeze/ So I did it again, this time racing my way to the machine and back, now with experience and a filled-in map to help me.

I got back with 16 minutes on the clock, and saved a bookmark with plenty of time to spare. That felt pretty good. When it comes to designing one of these loops, a key question is length. Outer Wilds designer and producer Loan Verneau has said “we wanted to keep things short enough [that] failure and death did not feel frustrating, but we also didn't want the player to feel like they were constantly on a time limit”.

Also, if players are expected to build a mental model of the timeline, it needs to be relatively short. A short timer should also be combined with a compressed world size - so no matter where you go, you’ll find something interesting within the time limit. Minit is carefully designed so that everything is reachable within a few seconds, leading to a densely packed world that spills off in all directions. The time loop is certainly a handy mechanic, then.

It wraps a nasty design problem up with a rather attractive bow, and creates cool new consequences for the player with clockwork puzzles, freedom to experiment, and temporal mastery. These are some fantastic games, and more are on the way, such as the one-room mystery game 12 Minutes, and Deathloop - which comes from the developers of Dishonored. But a time loop is, ultimately, a contrivance. It’s a gimmicky solution that calls attention to itself in a very loud way.

And while I think that’s fine, it ultimately won’t work in every type of game, or fit every type of narrative. And so, I’m left wondering if we can create more clockwork games, but without the loop. Well, one idea is to use smaller, less obvious loops that don’t rip you out of the simulation when they repeat. Hitman levels are made up of lots of small loops, with characters on repeated schedules that might take five or ten minutes to repeat.

This gives a pretty convincing emulation of reality, but without the messiness of a complete level-wide time loop. And another solution might be to investigate systemic and randomised events that aren’t handcrafted by the developer, and therefore can go on forever. Things like the weather effects in Zelda and MGS 5 provide that feeling of time moving on, outside of your control. Likewise, traffic patterns in open world games and characters in simulations all use simple rules and interconnectivity to create the illusion of reality, without the need for absolute clockwork choreography.

See this video for more on that. But for something more radical, let me tell you about a section in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. At the beginning of the game, you’re told that you need to hop on a helicopter and whizz off to an office block to save some hostages. Now, you’d be remiss for thinking that those terrorists will happily wait around forever and won’t do a thing until you get there. That is how time works in most games, after all.

But, actually, no. If Jensen is a bit, uhm, busy and waits around for too long, most of the hostages will be lost SARIF: "Eight people Adam. Eight good men and women whose only crime was to come to work today. And those so-called pro-human purists slaughtered them.” Letting the hostages get killed doesn’t lead to a game over of any sorts. But your inaction does change the story and your relationship with other characters - if only a tiny bit.

And so maybe this proves that it’s okay for games to be serious when they say that you only have a certain amount of time to do certain tasks - provided that the punishment for not getting there in time is simply a change in the story to reflect your inaction, or perhaps just leads to you missing some content altogether. And here’s the thing: modern games already have so much filler content, that I don’t think it would matter much if some players completely missed it because they were too busy doing other things.

So imagine a Batman or Spider-Man game where crimes are taking place in real-time, and as a superhero you’ve got to make the call of which criminals to chase down - and which ones you’re going to have to miss. Of course, such a system can’t be implemented lightly. Time limits are understandably controversial among players, for the way they put pressure and stress on your shoulders. And for many, the idea that game content can be missed goes against the completionist nature of slowly and methodically completing every task on a map.

So I understand if this sounds like the worst idea imaginable. But still, given the unique advantages of clockwork games, perhaps time could be the missing ingredient needed to spice up these samey and static open world games we keep seeing. Lemme know your thoughts in the comments below. Hey, thanks for watching. Tell me about your favourite clockwork games in the comments. Did you know that you can support GMTK when you buy games on the Epic Game Store by using the creator tag GMTOOLKIT?

You don’t pay a penny extra, but Epic gives me some cash, for some reason. Everybody wins! But, like, you know, mostly me.