Origins

I have hesitated to call "Traveler's Enigma" a game. In some places, I've said it is interactive fiction, or an imagined alternate or future "reality", others I've said it is what the title suggests - an enigma - a puzzle to be solved.

It's got a lot of video and text in it, maybe it is a book or a movie as much as it is a game!

The structure resembles the Myst series in format, and is most like Myst 3 and 4 in terms of its panoramic interface. I made the graphics in Lightwave, they are not perfect, but they are better than the graphics in most free games.

"Traveler's Enigma" is moderate in size - an acceptable balance between quality and scale. It is media-rich. I'm known for my movies, and if you like my effects elsewhere, the FMVs and integrated video in Traveler's Enigma won't disappoint - there is more VFX video here than in "Sabotage 757", "Troop 4: Uncensored, pt. 3", and "Super Soda" combined.

The music and sound design is derived from multiple sources - including some superb ambient tracks by composer Iain Morland. I also composed a lot of music myself.

Traveler's Enigma is a good choice for the puzzle-loving demographic, but I was careful not to let players get stuck - there are no reflex puzzles, or timed puzzles.

The puzzles start off being easy and become progressively harder.

Integrated into "Traveler's Enigma" is an interactive hint guide, a system better than almost any you'll find in a "professional" adventure game. It tallies your movement in the gameworld (frame changes) and each time they hit a certain number, you get a hint point. Hints are categorized by area, and are inaccessible until you've discovered the relevant area. The hints are progressive, you are forced to open vague hints for a puzzle before the outright solution - and what all this amounts to is a superb balance, in which players won't ever get stuck, and have access to all of the solutions (given enough time) but are still encouraged to try to solve puzzles on their own - as this will get them through faster.

The game also contains an intuitive, non-intrusive custom-developed inventory system, programmed in VBscript.

HISTORY/STORY OF TRAVELER's ENIGMA The content of Traveler's Enigma has been left under wraps for a long time, for fear of spoiling too much. People stared dumbfounded at the cryptic ads I scrawled in marker - with terms like "Casimir Effect", "Transdimensional Propulsion", "Cybernetic interface", and "God particle" overlaid on a jumbled mass of interconnected partial drawings. The great escalation into World War 3 began with a nuclear attack on Israel - prompting a massive retaliation and ultimately large-scale thermonuclear war annihilating over 20% of the Earth's population. A war between fundamentalist Islam and a secular and Christian West. By the end of the war five years later, hundreds of millions had perished worldwide not only from the war but from starvation, radiation, cancer, and abject poverty - the global economy was in shambles and only a few nations retained any real power or wealth. Desperate for peace and prosperity, the people of the Earth united under a progressive World Alliance, creating for the first time a unified world government under a charismatic, brilliant leader who promised to solve the Earth's problems. He offered aid to the poor and destitute, a plan to fix the environment, to rebuild the planet's infrastructure, to bring about a paradise on Earth from the ashes of the old world. In the process of securing peace, unity, and security, in the process of training human beings to cooperate under universal ideology, the World Alliance began to erase democratic ideals - freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to vote or peaceably assemble. The WA became a monolithic fascist dictatorship, executing millions without any process of law, solidifying the planet's wealth in the hands of a select few, breaking nearly every promise that its leaders had made. The new government descended into history's most brutal totalitarian state, keeping all its citizens under surveillance, researching electronic mind control and the genetic engineering of humans for the creation of a new "perfect" humanity devoid of free will. The regime spawned a growing underground resistance of people who hid in radioactive wastelands, retained old beliefs and individuality, and attempted to survive in the few areas the government could not find them. As this rebellion began to organize a coup, as asteroids impacted the Earth, total annihilation of all life on the planet became a very real possibility. In order to secure the future of humanity (and its own leadership) in the event of all-out war, the World Alliance developed Project Damocles, research into developing interdimensional travel for the survival of the elite few. The first test of the new technology has gone hideously wrong. You, as a physicist in the compound, are one of thousands of people transported off of the Earth into some other interdimensional position. You are not in your own universe anymore, and the conventional laws of physics don't quite apply. The question is, Where are you and what should you do? Keep in mind, nothing is what it appears to be. The lines between free will and destiny, between the natural and the supernatural, between truth and deception, imagination and objective reality, are not always clear-cut. And be careful who you trust... "Traveler's Enigma" is a compelling apocalyptic view of the future, a warning of the potential power of technology to liberate or destroy us. Far more than a simple adventure game, it is an incendiary, emotional, internally fractured and disturbing artistic expression. This is a dystopian vision inspired by various sci-fi works from "Blade Runner" to "Children of Men", current political trends, biblical doomsday prophecies, and secular projections about future technologies and environmental risks. It is also a very personal project that, in some sense, is a narrative extension of my own psychological instability, emotional chaos, and spiritual turmoil. There's a lot of text in game, but I wrote over 190 pages of stuff for this, what you see in-game is a small fraction of what was actually developed (and usually, thrown out). I treated the two "controversy magnets" - religion and politics - in the context of conflict, and allowed a wide range of characters to express their disparate views. You can respond to the text any way you want to. It's ambiguous and complex and might offend nearly anyone. I believe in the value of the game as a conversation-starter and source of internally conflicted philosophical debate, as art and entertainment. I would like to add a simple disclaimer - don't assume I believe everything I write. The characters and personas, in a way, wrote themselves, I wanted them to be authentically themselves and that meant digging into dark places of insanity, demonic influence, the influence of the Holy Spirit, despair, rage, euphoria, etc. Sometimes the feeling I'm going for comes across better in the text if I'm actually strongly emotional and unstable while writing it. I don't know how people will respond to it, but it is certainly not dull. I am uncertain on how to rate this by game standards - violence? Implied violence? moderate profanity? Sexual reference? Graphic torture? Discussion of suicide, genocide, societal implosion, nuclear war? Worship of God - and of the devil? If the game ratings boards got ahold of this, it would either be rated "T", or, possibly even "M". I would strongly advise that children not be exposed to this product - but not because of dark images (though they are present) so much as dark ideas.

Download screensaver here!