And you thought portals through space were weird

Imagine being able to lay down portals through time.

Or don't, since that's probably going to break your brain with the possibilities. Anyway, it's nice to see people thinking outside of the box with physics in games, while this isn't implemented into anything besides a little physics demo, it'd be probably be incredibly awesome to play in a full game, a la Achron but without have to manage all of your units and instead just running around with an even better portal gun.

Or not since Valve can't count to 3 but it would be awesome.

Holy shit, my brain.

That'll cause problems, I would think.

Hopefully, there's a more efficient implementation than "save the entire state of the world".

Doesn't seem too complicated. It's basically save states incorporated into a portal gun, i.e. instead of reloading a save via a menu it's instead via a portal...it'd certainly be a heaps neat idea, although I'm not sure how a developer can design puzzles around this gimmick. Each puzzle would have to be solvable without the use of the time gun because expecting a player to have the foresight that a particular point in time may be useful for solving a later puzzle is too much...unless you then incorporate a precognisance/fortune telling mechanic and holy crap that actually sounds really interesting.

Or you just allow multiple states in the clip, and encourage players to save often.

Allow multiple states and the first one is always the start of the puzzle so the player can reset the puzzle if ever they think they missed a state to save.

That's what I meant, yes.

Also: Saving state when you already have a portal open.

Hehe.

This looks very promising. I've always wanted to play a game where time travel is a large part of the gameplay, rather than just an element in the story. (Day of the Tentacle, Chrono Trigger, Ocarina of Time) The only other game I can think of that does something like this is that RTS game where you can send your armies back in time.

Time Travel as a puzzle element is fairly common. I find that it tends to be rather irritating

I imagine Gabe will see that article and announce that he'll go for it.

Or not since Valve can't count to 3 but it would be awesome.

They could always make a Portal 2.5

It's too bad I can't find a download link for this, I'd play it. Even though it's a tech demo.

Very neat. :) One thing I noticed is the states resume time (hence falling blocks at the time of the screenshot continue to fall once you bring up the state), but the player is not present in any loaded state (the block pile example at the end: if the player existed across both the normal play and the loaded state, you'd be able to screenshot the blocks, load the state, knock the blocks over, then watch yourself knock the blocks over in the loaded state.) I'm guessing they didn't do this to save on processing (since you'd have to render the player loading state within the loaded state, possibly resulting in an infinitely recursive loaded state...) But even if they took a shortcut and only rendered, say, the immediate loaded state and not any others, that could be an interesting way to interact with yourself in the past.

To quote a popular imageboards image:

ARE YOU A WIZARD?

<_>

edited 22nd Sep '11 1:35:52 PM by orimarc

The amazing thing is this is made with the Unity engine, which means this Portal 2.934398324439 could be a free browser-based game on Kongregate.

This is... amazing!

...wow.

Portal 2: Episode One.

This seems like an awesome idea. Time manipulation doesn't get used nearly as much as it should.

That looks pretty darn cool, though I have to wonder how they'll really make puzzles out of it—that "screenshot under falling blocks" trick has some potential but you can't squeeze it for the whole game, and otherwise going through a portal just takes you back to exactly the state you were in before but maybe on an opposite-facing wall. I suppose they could also get some potential out of "timed" rooms that become "unsolvable" after too much "time" elapses and thus require rapid and dextrous use of time-screenshots to beat the clock, but if more than, say, a quarter of the rooms used that (not counting an optional challenge mode like the ones in Portal) I don't think I'd want to play it. I know I only bothered to do a fraction of Portal's challenge rooms (mostly just the "minimum portals placed" challenges) because the rest weren't the kind of challenge I was interested in.

Ooh wait. Mobile enemies/npcs who react to each other's presence! Something like "Blue drones that see red drones move to attack them and visa versa, killing both. Blue drones that see blue doors or red drones that see red doors open them. Optionally drones who see you without seeing another enemy attack you." Probably without that last rule actually. With drones seeing and traveling through portals, so you'll have to manage and manipulate the number or position of the drones in either your own timeframe, the timeframe you're looking at (possibly to enter, possibly not), or both. That I can see a game's worth of puzzles out of. But it'd probably make whatever technical wizardry they're performing even harder.

x3 Don't start.

This just me an idea for a slightly different time-travel puzzle game. You could rewind time like in Po P, but doing so would keep you in the same place while your "past self" goes in reverse. If you jumped off a cliff then rewound, you'd still be falling but you could look up and see your past self jumping off.

Simple puzzle example:

-There's a button and a door, and the door will only stay open as long as the button is held. How to get through the door? Hold the button for awhile, rewind time, then go through the door while your past self holds the button.

Now you'll have a little time shadow that'll do what you just did...

^^http://www.onemorelevel.com/game/chronotron