The out-of-nowhere fascination with quantum mechanics and the aimless soul searching have finally amalgamated into one singular idea. I’ve decided to cut the pretend time bullshit and turn this tumblr into a proof of concept blog on my upcoming game: Not of this Era.

Not of this Era is, conceptually, a time travel sandbox that allows users to experiment with cause and effect over a series of different “eras.” Stylistically, aesthetically, and with regards to pacing, it is an homage to Out of this World, Flashback, and the other semi-forgotten adventure classics of the early 90’s.   

Our protagonist is Justin Bailey, oddball inventor by trade, and time traveler by accident. When Justin succeeds in completing his time machine, he unwittingly changes early history and returns to a fundamentally altered version of his reality (a la Ray Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder). In order to restore his universe to order (and complete the game), Justin will have to bring about a paradoxical reality. For example, Justin could interfere with his own past, and try to prevent his earlier plans to build a time machine, or he could travel through history and bring about the demise of an ancient ancestor of mankind. Either of these realities would render Justin’s entering a time machine logically impossible and thus return his universe to normal.

The image at the top is a sketch I did of Justin and his time machine. Right now its a copy of the Superbrothers’ pixel characters, but as I get more experience with pixel art, I plan to refine him and give him a style of his own.

This project will be my life for the next year. I’ll start by creating the basic art assets and then build a single test room for playing with the cause and effect time travel mechanics. Once I’ve got a beautifully working test room, I’ll write the story and side quests/plotlines for each era that Justin will visit, and create a Kickstarter project to (hopefully) fund part of the game. Then the real fun begins.

I’ll continue to post new art assets and status updates here. Enjoy!

- Mike Leisz

“Getting smacked by an entire universe would definitely leave a mark. Specifically, it would leave a disk-like pattern in our universe’s cosmic microwave background radiation, and this is what a group of cosmologists from University College London have been looking for. Somewhat incredibly, they managed to find some of these bruises. Four of them. And it’s ten times more likely that the four marks are universe collision signatures than that they are anything else that we know of.”