Time From Earth, my third game for the Playdate (And third game ever!) is now ready for launch after working on it for approx. 2 months.

Whilst Life's Too Short was very jovial and influenced by British humour and older horror point-and-click games, Time From Earth has some more grown-up influences (Whilst still hopefully retaining the charm of previous games...)

The first influence was a project I started working on with my brother Elliott earlier this year...We were looking into a simulation game where you're managing a self-sustaining space ship as an engineer whilst a mystery unfolds around you. 

We got quite far through forming the idea and you can see below one of the early rough models of the ship structure but in the end Elliott started work on his passion project https://elliottcoe.itch.io/the-devil-preys-on-grief whilst I kept going with Playdate launches. Elliott's future plan is to bring Time From Earth to 3D with a remake after his current project ships in 2023-2024.

The second key influence to the story was something I saw during a visit to the Our Time On Earth exhibition at the Barbican (And as you can see, the name is also a tip of the hat!): https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2022/event/our-time-on-earth. The exhibition focuses on how we as humans can work more closely with the natural world for a more integrated future. It was super inspiring!

The exhibition contains one piece named Planet City by Liam Young which explores the idea of the entire human race retreating to one mega city whilst the natural world recovers: https://liamyoung.org/projects/planet-city. Time From Earth explores this idea in a slightly different way but I loved the concept of thinking differently about our future connection with Earth.

I hope people enjoy the game and that it can be inspiring to think differently about our future on this Earth. I wanted the message to be a positive and constructive one filled with hope rather than "We're all doomed!" and I hope it comes across that we have an amazing world to share and enjoy.

All feedback is welcome and thank you to everybody who has been involved in the project and everybody who plays the game!