Polchinski's Paradox

Polchinski's Paradox is a a Time-Travelling Puzzle Platformer inspired by the Paradox itself

A ball is fired into a wormhole at an angle such that, if it continues along that path, it will exit the wormhole in the past at just the right angle to collide with its earlier self, thereby knocking it off course and preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place.

The Game

The goal of the game is to solve the levels by going through the final door. There are buttons along the map that activate some doors, you must figure out what combination of buttons open each door.  However, the moment you let go, the doors close, so how can you get through?

In this game, you can create time portals (or Time Drones?)  from which you can go back in time to that very point. You use this ability to activate doors, then when you return back in time, the previous copy of yourself activates, which mimics your very moves, will go and activate the door as you did in the past. Allowing you to pass through the door as it opens.

However, the environment is old, unstable and decaying, and time travelling speeds things up! Do not abuse this as you will run out of spaces to move to!

But what about Paradoxes you ask? Your past self never saw you going through the door, as it hadn't happened (yet?), therefore you must make sure to avoid being in your past self's eyesight at any cost! Otherwise, you'll create a Paradox.
The rip in space time will bring in a Paradoxia in its place. A time-travelling entity which will attempt to consume you. Should this happen you have to outrun it for a few seconds and it will disappear. 

As the environment worsens, your past self may find itself walking across a tile that does not exist anymore either and fall through - this is another Paradox that must be avoided. Try to anticipate where a tile is falling to avoid this from happening!

The goal is to go through the levels as quickly as possible, avoiding the obstacles and the world from collapsing completely and without creating any more disruptions.

Gameplay Tips

• I recommend the use of Controller to play, but keyboard works just fine too.
• All Menus are only handled by the use of the mouse as of the Game Jam release.
• Your movements start being recorded the moment you leave your Time Portal. Press the same button to go back in time - But your copy will dissapear at that very spot too so wait enough time if necessary!
• When dealing with buttons you have to wait for (whether it's one, or many buttons that must be pressed to open a door) waiting is inevitable. You can speed things up by pressing the Speed button (which speeds up time by 4x) to avoid waiting for long.
• Numbered buttons must be pressed in the right order, but any other non-numbered button can be added into the mix in any order.
• After dropping a Time Drone, if you are unhappy about the location, you can pick it up and move it somewhere else.
• If there's an empty tile that stops you from getting where you want to get to, you can jump across - The animation has some bugs where it freezes after the jump sometimes unfortunately, if that happens, just jump again whilst idle and should revert back to normal.

Game Modes

Puzzle - Custom designed maps. Only 4 this time as of the Game Jam release. I didn't have time to make more. But I'm hoping to add more after the GameJam is over!

Arena - This is an experimental mode I added to try and provide a competitive approach to the game. A never ending mode where you get more buttons and larger maps each level you go by. This mode relies a little too much on luck as the game stands, but fun either way as it's hard to avoid Paradoxes in higher levels!

Controls

	Keyboard	Controller (XBox / XInput)
Movement	W A S D	Left Joystick
Jump	Spacebar	A
Portal	R Shift	B
Speedup Time	Enter	X
Zoom / Rotate Camera	Arrow Keys	Right Joystick

Hope you have as much fun playing as I did developing this.

Thank you Epic for coming up with this fun theme. After a couple nights rest I want to explore this game further and improve the mechanics where it lacks. Stay tuned if you want to follow this project further!