A Timely Escape

Development

A Timely Escape was a project undertaken by 13 university students during our final game development class. I pitched the central concept: a lab rat navigating time-travel puzzles, set amidst post-apocalyptic backdrops. Challenges arose in our large team, with various interpretations of the game's vision, resulting in misaligned development efforts. Late into the project, it became apparent that unification was needed. After a thorough reevaluation and necessary feature reductions, we successfully presented a cohesive game at the Museum of Technology in Stockholm. [Link to exhibition].

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My contribution

As the original idea for the project was mine, it was only natural that the responsibility to develop the game's core feature and system, the time travel, fell upon me. Thus, my key areas of focus were the design and implementation of:

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• An event-based, temporally consistent Time Travel & "Destiny" System

• An additive scene loading system, to load and unload rooms in front of and behind the player dynamically

• Developer tools to easily switch between eras in-engine 

• A custom event system

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In this project, I designed a system to manage time travel paradoxes across three timelines using an event-based architecture and a central Time Travel Manager. This manager adjusted the trajectory and consistency of subscribing Time Travel Objects. I resolved challenges like preventing player collisions with props during timeline transitions by keeping all object colliders active but switching their collision layers. While I would focus more on team alignment on mechanics and puzzle concepts if I could do it again, this is among my proudest projects.