Ready to question your existence while giving a fly the time of their life? You've gotta play Time Flies, a puzzle adventure about fulfilling a fly's bucket list before its life ends. Find out more directly from the folks bringing this game to life, Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz!
Time Flies Q&A with Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz
Release Date: 2025
Developer: Playables
Publisher: Panic
Platform(s): PC, PS5, Switch
In a gaming landscape where many titles aim to offer sprawling worlds and hundreds of hours of gameplay — experiences that, increasingly in my own life, seem impossible to make time for — enter Time Flies, a game that challenges you to make the most of mere seconds.
Playing as a humble housefly with a ticking clock, your time is intentionally limited based on real-world human life expectancy data translated from years to seconds. It's your task to check as many items of your bucket list as possible while the clock ticks down.
A little bit morbid and a lot about exploring, toying with objects or causing mischief, and finding joy and unexpected delight in your surroundings, Time Flies is a game we tried at PAX West last year that we knew we had to come back for when we hit up the Seattle show again in September 2024.
The developers were kind enough to lend us their time for an interview, which you can read below!
Julie - VGG: To start, can you both introduce yourselves and briefly describe what your game is about for anyone unfamiliar?
Raphaël Munoz: I'm Raphaël Munoz. I'm developer and coder on Time Flies.
Michael Frei: My name is Michael Frei. I'm the… well, I do everything else but coding, I guess.
In Time Flies, you're a fly, and you have a limited amount of time to complete your bucket list before you die. The time you have is determined by where you played from. We take the life expectancy of countries, determined by the World Health Organization; we take the years, translate them into seconds, and that's the time you have.
[For example: The average lifespan in the United States according to the WHO is 76.33 years, so you have 76.33 seconds to explore.]
Julie - VGG: With that concept, we kind of see two sides to Time Flies. There's the really silly, flying around and dying in funny ways, pushing statues together to make them kiss, and all those funny little scenarios that you're put in.
And then there's also this reminder of our mortality with it leaning on real life expectancy.
Can you talk about striking that balance of the silly and serious in this game, and any challenges in making sure that felt just right?
Frei: It's mostly determined by what we find funny, I guess. It's probably not up everyone's alley, but I'm okay with that. [Laughs]
Munoz: I think the serious part of the game comes from when we started the game. It was after the pandemic began, and it was actually the city of Zurich that had a call for projects. They wanted people to make prototypes and the idea was to create interactive things involving the concept of “technology for good” or something like that.
We wanted to have a clear message in the game, so we started with broad serious questions of inequality and things like that, and that led us to the point of life expectancy.
It was supposed to be just a prototype around that idea. And then Michael actually made the thing fun. And so we started playing with those two things, the serious part and the fun part.
Frei: I think the very first idea was actually not even a game. We wanted to make a browser extension — not even with life expectancy data. We wanted to visualize how you're tracked on websites and every data tracker would be a fly that annoys you on the website…But we didn't know how to pull that off.
So, okay, we have the idea with the fly. That’s kind of interesting. And we still wanted to work with information from the internet. And that’s when the life expectancy data came in. That was the first spark, if you will.
Julie - VGG: You know, the look of the game, where the fly you're in control of is represented by this literal speck, and the stark black-and-white pixel art palette, really works well with giving that feeling of being small and insignificant in a massive world. What went into your design choices for creating the game?
Frei: It was kind of a logical continuation of my work, in a way. I’ve done black-and-white projects before: I made Plug and Play, which was about duality, with characters with plugs and some with sockets. And then after that, I made Kids, where all the characters are exactly the same.
And I thought it would be interesting to have a character that's even more simple. I don't know if you can get more simple than one pixel.
Julie - VGG: Time Flies has these really specific goals set, but it doesn't really hold your hand in how you get to those outcomes. It feels like it’s all about exploring and stumbling upon these little things that are hidden in plain sight.
How would you say your game rewards players for their curiosity in looking for these little vignettes?
Frei: I think in the very beginning, it was even more like an open world idea, something you can explore infinitely. But that doesn't really translate that well into a game that has a start and an end.
It's a lot of just trial and error though, until it feels right.
Munoz: Also I think we try to keep the game simple so that those things that are actually hidden in plain sight can be found. The whole design process [was built around] not giving too much information to the player so you can explore and find things by yourself. Usually, that actually feels better than having pointers so you have to go here and there. We wanted to go back to that space of a video game where you have to find everything by yourself.
Nate - VGG: Yeah! It's really fun just going around and experimenting. You see something, you kind of vaguely go “okay, we know these are the things on the bucket list… oh, maybe that's how that works!” From the aesthetics to the world design, I think it just communicates it really simply in a nice way.
Julie - VGG: It seems like so much fun to come up with those goals. I'm curious, what was the process like coming up with translating these really simple, sort of vague bucket list items like "Get Rich" or "Make Someone Laugh" into things that the fly can actually accomplish?
Did you come up with the funny scenarios first, just things that you thought were funny for a fly to do and then came up with a bucket list item that matched, or vice versa?
Frei: It depends. Some ideas really start as a silly drawing and then we'd think about how to name the bucket list items.
And some things came to us just by looking at people's bucket lists, or by thinking about our own bucket lists. Often it's also a question of how to name the bucket list item to make it funny.
Julie - VGG: Were there any bucket list items that ended up on the cutting room floor that you just couldn't think of a way to make the fly accomplish?
Frei: Yeah, I think we had a lot of ideas that we killed.
Munoz: A lot of ideas just didn’t work. We have a long list of bucket list items that we couldn't find ideas for, so we really needed a lot of ideas to try to find the one that works.
Coming up with the animation and the design concept wasn’t easy. There’s a lot of back and forth.
Frei: If you play the game, it's basically our best-of list.
I like the interactions that are that are quite simple. One of my favorites is probably still, “Find God,” but I won't spoil [what that means] here.
Nate - VGG: Now I'm just imagining it cutting to a live feed of you. [Laughs]
Julie - VGG: What is your favorite thing about the game at this point in development? Something that you would really want people to know about it?
Frei: We have been working on this for quite some time now, so sometimes it's difficult to see what works. We usually see what doesn't work and when we show the game, like here at PAX, it's actually nice to see it working.
For a long time, the first level that is in the game, what we show as the demo, was always the best level for a while. But now I think the second level is actually better than the first one.
Julie - VGG: Something to look forward to!
I wanted to wrap up with sort of a fun question. Obviously, getting this game over the finish line is probably one of them, but what is one thing that's on your bucket list right now?
Munoz: … Other than finishing the game? [Laughs]
Julie - VGG: I'm sure that one's right up at the top.
Frei: Right now, at the top of my bucket list is to exit to Expo Hall and maybe see Seattle for a day. I'll try to take a walk this afternoon because I've only moved in the triangle of restaurants, hotels, and PAX.
Munoz: I will say, the fun thing is… when we first started to think about the bucket list. We’ve been very critical about it. Like “those are silly things.” You take bucket list items from [other] people that want to do things, and you think you want to do them as well, but it's not really coming from you.
It's a bit weird. We don't really work in that kind of way. We do things as they come.
Nate - VGG: Is there anything else you want to say about the project? About what's coming?
Frei: Well, there's a lot of confusion… I think people think it's a Playdate game sometimes. I just want to clear that up. It's not a Playdate game.
We were working together on a game for Playdate that was never made, but we pitched the game to Playdate before we started working on Time Flies, so our brain was already kind of in the Playdate resolution space, and I think that's why it's a little bit like that.
Unfortunately, it's not a Playdate game. But maybe one day, who knows?
Nate - VGG: Playdate port? [Laughs] Awesome. The game's still in progress, but any idea about a release window yet?
Frei: We'll keep it vague and say 2025. And we really believe in that.
Nate - VGG: Awesome. Thank you guys so much.
Spend some of your life expectancy anticipating Time Flies, wishlisting it, and playing it when it releases in 2025!
Want to see more like this? Check out all of our PAX West 2024 coverage.
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