Most bullet hells punish a mistake by ending the run. Negative Time punishes it by dragging you backward. Get hit and the screen pixelates, the clock runs the wrong direction, and you find yourself in rooms numbered below zero, where the enemies are new, the weapons are new, and dying again is the only way back out.
That idea came out of the 2025 GMTK Game Jam, where the theme was Loop and CodeRed and Golden Disguise decided a straightforward time loop would be the most crowded lane in the jam. The two of them make up Round Owl: CodeRed handles the Unity project, Golden Disguise handles the art and, by CodeRed’s own accounting, about 90% of the ideas. What was supposed to be a slightly expanded jam build turned into just over a year of work, picking up a roguelike blessing system, minibosses, a lore archive, and a final cutscene along the way.
Negative Time hits Steam on August 21. For this SDC Highlight, we talked with Round Owl about scope creep, the rewind bug that softlocks the entire game, a balance problem named Wand, and the enduring importance of windows.
What was the original idea that eventually became Negative Time? Was the time-reversal mechanic there from the beginning, or did it emerge later in development?
CodeRed – The original idea for Negative Time came from the 2025 GMTK Game Jam, which is when my dev partner Golden Disguise and I first created the game. The theme that year was Loop, which immediately had us thinking about some kind of time loop situation. However, both of us like making unique interpretations of game jam themes, and having a basic time loop was definitely going to be everywhere in the game jam. We bounced around some other ideas, like a racing game where each time you loop around the track it changes, but eventually I came up with the idea of a bullet hell where each time you die you are sent further back in time, which we both decided to go forward with. So yes, the time-reversal mechanic was there from the beginning.
How long has Negative Time been in development, and how has the game changed during that time? Can you also tell us a bit about the makeup of Round Owl as well?
CodeRed – Negative Time has been in development for just over a year now! The game has grown a lot over the last year, mainly in scope, honestly, lol. Our original hope was to keep Negative Time small. We planned to add just a bit more content to the game jam version and release it around late 2025/early 2026. But instead, we ended up adding a roguelike random upgrade system called blessings, adding minibosses, lore, and more. I’m very happy with the final result, but yeah, scope creep did get the better of us.
And yeah, a bit about us: Round Owl is a partnership between myself (CodeRed, programmer) and Golden Disguise (animator). I’m the one who is in the trenches of the Unity project, while Golden Disguise is the one coming up with 90% of the ideas, while in call watching my shared screen.
What games or other media had the biggest influence on Negative Time? Were there any particular games you looked toward when developing its combat, roguelike structure, or time mechanics?
Golden Disguise – For combat, I’m not going to act like it isn’t obvious: Enter the Gungeon is a huge inspiration for the moment-to-moment gameplay of Negative Time. In fact, I think I modeled the roll animation directly off of Enter the Gungeon’s.
CodeRed – For roguelike structure, I took inspiration from the way Hades does boons. The different categories of blessings are similar to the different gods who give you their boons, and originally blessing categories were also presented on the ground as items similar to the way boons appear in Hades.
Playing Negative Time is somewhat reminiscent of classic Flash-era games, particularly its fast-paced top-down action and visual style. Was that era of games an influence at all? Are there any older web or Flash games that had an impact on the game or on you as developers?
CodeRed – Interestingly, I think Negative Time is one of our games that takes direct inspiration from Flash games the least, at least in terms of visuals with the pixelated look. A lot of our other games, I’d say, look a lot more Flash-like, given Golden Disguise’s art style. However, that doesn’t mean Flash games haven’t affected the game at all. Flash games greatly affected me as a developer, given the fact that my first experience playing video games was through random Flash games. I can’t think of any that directly inspired things in Negative Time at the moment, but some notable Flash games I can think of that I really liked include Ninja Brawl, Lose the Heat, any racing games, and any games on the website Sploder (that’s where I first started making games!).
The central idea of being sent further back in time every time you’re hit is really unusual. How did you arrive at that mechanic?
CodeRed – Well, to expand on what I said before, we were originally thinking of doing a bullet hell game where you can save the game, and when you die, the game rewinds to your last save. The lose condition, then, would be effectively getting softlocked due to misplacing a save. I didn’t really like this idea, but I liked the concept of a rewinding bullet hell. I don’t really remember if the idea of going into “negative time” came first, or the idea of being sent further back in time every time you are hit. But either way, one idea naturally led to the other. I instantly loved the concept of a negative area of the game, and the rest is history.
How difficult was the time-reversal mechanic to implement technically? What challenges came with having the game continually remember and reconstruct previous states?
CodeRed – It wasn’t too difficult to create an initial working version. The real problem came with expanding it without it becoming a mess (spoiler, it did become a mess). One bug that has plagued the game since its original game jam version involves any error occurring during the frame in which the game rewinds everything. The game goes through and calls functions on any objects with the rewinder component that existed at that time, giving it the state to rewind to. It also calls an OnRewind event. The problem is that if there is any error, like a null reference, in any of these functions, the rest of the rewind coroutine fails to run, resulting in a permanently pixelated screen, since the game has a cool effect where the screen pixelates as you rewind. Obviously, ideally you don’t have any errors to begin with, but it is just really unfortunate that an error that otherwise might not affect anything can cause a softlock because of the way rewinding is structured.
Did the rewind mechanic create any unexpected strategies or player behaviors during playtesting?
Golden Disguise – In the initial game jam version of the game, we hadn’t implemented any systems to stop or discourage you from AFKing, and in a game where time is effectively your health, the longer you sit still without risk, the more health you gain, so AFKing was an optimal strategy, which we did not like, because we were intending Negative Time to have a fast-paced escape feel to it.
Negative Time turns failure into an opportunity to discover new enemies and weapons. How did you approach making failure itself part of the player’s progression?
Golden Disguise – I wanted to utilize the negative and positive format so that the game never truly has a lose state. If you die in positive time, you go to negative time where you can make permanent progression, and if you die in negative time, you can go to positive time to get more blessings for temporary upgrades, so losing is always a smooth gateway to getting something good.
Were there any weapon, blessing, or other combinations that completely broke the game during development? In a roguelike, how do you decide when an overpowered combination needs to be balanced versus when discovering something broken is simply part of the fun?
Golden Disguise – Wand. Always wand. It’s one of our favorite weapons, but it has consistently been such a pain to balance. It’s just the way that it interacts so well with every blessing that we had to neuter its base stats just to make it scale worse. Nevertheless, it is still one of the best weapons in the game.
What changed the most as a result of watching people play Negative Time? Were there any mechanics, encounters, or systems you substantially reworked because of player feedback?
Golden Disguise – Maybe it’s just me not wanting to change our game based on what other people say. But we haven’t made many alterations due to player feedback. Probably the biggest change is how you used to not be able to roll through the Conductor’s lightning, which made the Conductor a lot harder in a way that I liked but also was poorly communicated and ultimately overly frustrating, so we changed it.
Was there anything that started as a small experiment or seemingly minor idea that unexpectedly became a major part of the finished game?
Golden Disguise – Bullet deletion in general. It was originally just something that we added to Big Block so that it could be a more effective defensive tool. But then we just kept adding it in places; eventually, bullet deletion fields became the signature ability of player blessings, and now certain enemies have them too, and suddenly it’s all over the place.
What part of Negative Time took considerably more work than you think most players will realize?
Golden Disguise – Lore took so long to make, between actually making the UI, writing the dialogue, and figuring out the mechanical systems to display the lore. Just coming up with the damn thing took so much time. There were multiple nights where we were just staying up effectively theorizing about lore that didn’t even fully exist. And possibly the smallest thing that took the most time was windows. Yep, that little visual element in every room, manually placed for every room preset. We manually chose each type of window for each room. It took so long for such a small feature, but it was worth it. Windows are great.
After spending so long developing the game, what has the process of actually approaching release been like for the team?
CodeRed – Very difficult. We’ve consistently underestimated the amount of time stuff would take while developing this game, and the release has been a struggle because of it. I’ve constantly been in a state of feeling like the release is just around the corner, and so finally settling on a release date and sticking to it feels nerve-wracking. We did many playtests over the course of the game’s development, and I would always work until the last minute to get changes done. The problem would inevitably be that I would break something just before the playtest, and so I am currently trying to effectively have the game “done” by August 14th, so if I break anything last minute, we’ll have a week to fix it. The trick will be actually having the game done by the 14th… Here’s hoping!
What is the most memorable bug you encountered while developing Negative Time? Did the time-rewinding system result in any particularly strange ones?
Golden Disguise – In older versions of the game, whenever you killed a Reclaimer, there was about a 25% chance that they would just revive themselves a few seconds after dying, just deciding to get better. For the rewinding system, the most memorable bug was known as eggnog time. It’s where you would be in negative time, the location, but the timer and how the timer functions would be as if you were in positive time, so we called it negative positive time, which eventually devolved into eggnog time. (There was also the reverse, which is known as Pegnog time.)
With release approaching, what part of Negative Time are you most excited to finally see players experience?
CodeRed – The final cutscene. We’ve spent a good portion of the last few months adding lore to the game, which was a completely unnecessary, extra addition I thought of as a high-hopes goal. But we had already taken so much longer on the game than we thought that we figured “why not?” And as with everything else, it took a lot longer than I thought to add, but BOY was it worth it! The final cutscene is only like 30 seconds long, but I LOVED making it. I only hope people will actually get to see it, though, since the game is very, very difficult.
What do you lean on to keep going when inspiration, excitement, and novelty have all seemed to abandon you?
Our previous SDC Highlight developer, CLYDE Games of Cursemark (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3219180/Cursemark/), left this question for you.
CodeRed – It depends, but I’d say a consistent fixation throughout Negative Time’s development that has helped me stay excited about game development is Deltarune. Chapters 3 and 4 came out right around when we first started making the game, and I got SUPER into it. I even got Golden Disguise to play the game for the first time, and some of our friends and I joined in to voice characters. Even though Deltarune is a very different game from Negative Time, it has consistently been a huge inspiration, mainly by just reminding me what I love so much about games, and game creation in general. And I mean… it does have bullet hell elements so there’s that!
Golden Disguise – I am extremely lucky to not often have to deal with this situation. I am 95% of the time completely obsessed with the game that I am working on, but during the small lows, really, I just tough it out. I know that it will eventually be fun again, and while working on a longer-term project, you aren’t always going to want to work on the project, but sometimes you just have to keep going. (I am not saying that this is a healthy way to handle it, but it is my way.)
Lastly, what question would you like to ask the next developer featured by SDC?
CodeRed – I’ll let Golden Disguise figure that out. 🙂
Golden Disguise – I know that this isn’t a very game dev-related question, but I would love to know what game they have stopped playing yet still hold dear in their heart. For me, that game is Halo.
Round Owl leaves the next SDC Highlight developer with a question that has nothing to do with game development and everything to do with why people make games in the first place: what game have you stopped playing but still hold dear? For Golden Disguise, it’s Halo. Thanks to CodeRed and Golden Disguise for taking the time this close to launch. Negative Time releases on Steam on August 21, with development updates on CodeRed’s YouTube channel and a Discord that’s open if you find something broken or just want to argue about whether Wand is still overtuned.