The natural jump to 3D for the most ubiquitous of console genres was a shaky one. Despite Nintendo getting right on the first try with the excellent Super Mario 64 and several recent exceptions (such as the Sly Cooper and Ratchet & Clank games), 3D platformers have become as stale and generic for modern gamers as their 2D ancestors were for the SNES/Genesis crowd. This is largely part to the "phoning-in" of identical platformer mechanics to make dozens of license games: most notably those cashing in on the success of Nicktoons' and Cartoon Network's popular animated shows.
Instead of coming up with reasons why I like the genre (and I do, since they're very uncomplicated games and that mixes well with the often complex strategy and RPG games) or any kind of design features or gimmicks I thought were cool in past games (because there's a lot and I'd be here all night), I've decided to try to come with a Platformer game idea to disprove that there's no originality left in the genre.
Game Idea - There are a few games that do some gimmicky things with time; notable examples include the Prince of Persia games and Blinx which allow you to slow down, speed up and briefly stop time to get past obstacles. Rather than use time in an instantaneous action/move-sense, this game focuses on travelling through time with a real-time "timeline" to be wary of, with various pre-set events on it per level. While the powers in this game can be used reactively (you can avoid an enemy's attack by suddenly jumping through time), they'll be mostly used to solve problems and open up/access new areas that may be closed off in the "present" to allow you to proceed.
Because your mastery of time-travelling needs to be learnt gradually, the first stage will allow hops through time of about five minutes. That is to say, five minutes back or five minutes forward from regular game time. So puzzles based on this limited timeshifting power will be based on a particularly unstable area and are fairly simple to solve: Finding a useful key behind a suddenly collapsed pile of rubble would mean jumping back five minutes to make the rubble vanish (as it has yet to fall). Jumping forward five minutes will allow you to avoid a sudden meteor shower in the present.
Later levels will allow bigger hops through time to solve more complex puzzles. You'll receive a "timeline" for the level, which may start some time before you entered the level and will end at some kind of level-imposed deadline. For example, there's a level on a spaceship orbiting a vital planet you need to land on. At the end of the timeline, the spaceship will leave orbit and you'll fail to reach your intended target in time. You will need to explore the area as well as observe time-based events on the level by rewinding/fast-forwarding the timeline (which could be anywhere between 10 minutes and several hours long for the whole level overall). You'll then go about fulfilling objectives such as setting off the self-destruct, finding anything useful on board, perhaps a few other side missions like stealing the plans to a weapon or the captain's report (which will all have time-based problem-solving of their own) and get off the ship in time. Your powers will still be limited, so you won't be able to travel much more than a few segments (from five minutes long and onwards, depending on how far you've progressed with your training) of the timeline at once, though there will be an option to rewind the entire timeline if you think you missed something (maybe as some kind of save/restart timeline point somewhere on the level). There may be several "events" in the timeline which you can both convenience and inconvenience you: The captain may leave his cabin for ten minutes to visit the bridge (in case you need something from his cabin without him spotting you), the middle 30 minutes of the timeline will have the ship's alarms raised as they pass through an asteroid field around the planet (so you'd need to keep a low profile to avoid all the crew rushing back and forth to protect the ship).
With (hopefully) a lot of the puzzles, there'll be two methods on how to solve it: the clever route or the dangerous route. If you can't solve the captain's cabin problem with the clever solution, you can always set off the self-destruct and sabotage it so it can't be undone (which will be a main requirement for the level's success anyway), fast-forward until everyone's escaped off the ship, grab whatever you need from the now empty captain's cabin and then quickly rewind time or restart it (with the restart point) before you blow up.
Obviously there needs to be a coherent narrative reason for you being somewhere like this, as well as a coherent reason why there aren't a million yous doing stuff at different times, but thanks to good old video game logic the second point shouldn't be a problem. Credibility has never really been the Platformer's strong suit anyway (so much for me being part of the solution and not part of the problem, tsk).
I may have to expand on this idea in a future update for more instances of how the timeline-based gameplay could be used to solve problems (not to mention some kind of cool story and background setting to tie it all together with), but this'll be all for today since I think I'm tapped out.
