Project Introduction

Created by a team of 3 people, including the co-designer of Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves, TimeMelters brings you to a mythical land of dreams and nightmares, where witch trials seem the only answer to the preternatural forces threatening the land.

TimeMelters is a hardcore action-strategy game that features a unique game mechanic: Time Travel, which allows the players to go back in time and fight alongside themselves. You play as Teagan, a witch whose powers were just recently unleashed by an unwelcome guest. Now, you must venture forth in a desperate effort to cleanse the countryside from the seeping evil that is corrupting it.

We want to create game that brings back that feeling to player. We worked hard to create never before seen game mechanics, combined with a rich deep storyline for TimeMelters. What starts out by looking like a simple time bending strategy game turns out to be much, much bigger as the story unfolds and new game mechanics are introduced in the second half of the game... check it out ;)

We created a unique deterministic system called PSS (permanent strategic system) which allows the player to manage the Time Distortion as he goes back in time. Our system is NOT just a replay system. When you go back in time, you can have effects on previous timelines, and we offer the player tools to understand what these effects are.

For example, at any time during the game, the player can pause the game, and see what his "future selves" will do, like activate a trap in exactly 17 seconds, kill that group of enemy over the next minute, etc... Even better, if a group of enemy was supposed to die, but because of his interventions the player created some time distortion that affected that group of enemies, the UI tells the player that X enemies should have died so far, but didn't because of his actions.

I know it looks simple, but creating such a deterministic system meant creating our own programming solutions (animation system, pathfinding system, networking, etc..) since the simulation has to play EXACTLY the same everytime, without being a simple replay.

Finally, I would say the context is quite unique. You play a woman who has been accused of being a witch. She manages to escape the pyre, and is being chased by the Inquisition, all while fighting legions of Corrupted invading the land. Over time, she will become a powerful witch, and will try to save the very same men who put her on the pyre.

Also, note that the game won the Grand Prize for the Ubisoft Indie Contest (with the 50,000$ grand attached to it), ans also 2 awards at the Montreal International Game Summit, including Best Technological Innovation and the People's Choice award!

About Developer

My studio is called Autoexec Games. It refers to an old dos command I used to type when I wanted to launch a videogame as a kid. Back then, when you started a game, you really did not know what to expect. There was no trailers, no streamers, just a box, a description, and a few images and a descrption that had to convince you to buy that game.

And when you arrived home to launch the game, you typed in "autoexec" and, sometimes, you were blast away. King's Quest, Dune II, Wing Commander, Warcraft, Master of Orion, Warhammer Dark Omen, Diablo... you name it. That "felling" of never knowing what to expect; of learning new game rules, of discovering new game universe is really what drives our studio.

We are a small team, really, and we worked on TimeMelters for the past 5 years. We hired freelancers all over Canada (Vancouver, Alberta, etc.) to give us a hand on this project, and we wanted to create a game where women are not just the "princess to be saved", in TimeMelters, Teagan, the main character, is the one who saves the day!