Achron - Multiplayer Time Travel RTS

An amazing concept for a game. Using time travel to change the course of events in a battle has always been the realm of the saved game. For many, the last greatest step in time travel came with the invention of auto-save; no longer forced to concentrate on remembering to save the game, gamers were actually able to play again. Of course this wouldn't work in multiplayer games as any changes made to your game were also made to your opponent's. Well, no longer.

The gameplay in Achron (pronounced ay-kron, think Fonzie from Happy Days) is based around real-time strategy and has a number of similarities to other games in the genre: resource gathering, unit and building construction and command, an upgradeable tech tree, and of course, combat. Enter the timeline. This can get a little dicey to explain so I will let the guys at Hazardous Software describe how it works:

The graphics look kind of rough because Achron is still in development. There is no currently planned release date as Hazardous Software is seeking a publisher, from the FAQ's on their site:

"The primary things we have left are art, level implementation and balancing."

So when I say development, I really mean that they have been play testing Achron for 4 years now and are satisfied that they have worked the bugs out of simulated timetravel with their in-house Resequence Engine.

The Resequence Engine was designed to be a flexible game engine that would allow users and agents within the game to travel through time within a window. What they ended up with was a "Serious Gaming, Training, & Multi-Temporal Decision Support Platform." The computational model for the engine uses threads to model time waves. They do this by altering a thread's basic functionality slightly, instead of having the threads run different computational tasks at the same time the threads are being used to run the same task at different points along it's timeline. By using threads in this manner they have created a new model

"to run simulations or even deployed software wherever a user wants to change the history of an application while it is running (e.g., removing a fault that occurred in the past, fast-forwarding the change to the present) or wants to run a simulation which uses its own future output as input for predicting the future (e.g., financial modeling)." ¹

Naturally Hazardous Software has received attention in the Resequence Engine for, you guessed it, military and corporate applications. Some things the engine could be used for include casualty and long-term effects training, finding best response strategies for emergencies such as a zombie invasion, and qualitative sensitivity analysis of simulations, or measuring the impact of decisions. Of course I wouldn't be surprised to see an actual Terminator running around before too long. Regardless, I look forward to seeing Achron find a publisher so I can play this game as soon as possible.