It’s About Time
It’s About Time is a 3D Third Person Action Puzzler where players switch control between two robot siblings that, using their unique time manipulation abilities, must work together to conquer the challenges and puzzles in a massive Clock Tower. While one of the characters, Cog can use his Time Pillar to slow down time, his sister, Pinion, uses it to speed it up. Both characters are never together in the same place, yet their journeys frequently overlap, with players being required to switch between them to unlock their paths through the levels.
The game features 3 fully fledged levels and a boss fight.
Platform:
PC
Genre:
3rd Person Action Adventure
My Roles:
Project Manager
Level Designer
Cinematic Designer
Responsibilities
Managed a core team of 5 + 9 collaborators
Created and maintained the Game Design Document
Generated task lists and ensured the project milestones were reached in a timely manner
With the team, designed the core mechanics and game pillars
Owned the third and last level of the game, taking it from the layout plan to whiteboxing and then Final
Co-designed the first level of the game
Co-designed the boss battle
Tested and iterated on each level’s design to ensure the best possible experience
Co-wrote dialogue for in-game moments and the trailer
Created the cinematics used in the game and for the trailer
Creative Process & Design Challenges
-
Since the early stages of the project, our goal was to provide the player with a unique experience involving two different characters. To help emphasize that, we created the levels in a way that played to each character's strengths. With Cog, we focused on providing a lot of combat encounters and, with Pinion, more puzzle-solving. That way, we were able to use Pinion's sections as a way of offering a break between Cog's intense sequences.
-
Since our game has a Third Person fixed camera, I considered that when building levels, ensuring that players can always only see what they are supposed to see and highlighting essential elements to optimize the level's flow.
-
One of our biggest challenges was clearly communicating that time behaves differently with each character. To accomplish that, I provided the player with props and enemies moving in Cog's section but frozen in Pinion's to make it more evident.
-
One of our core mechanics was the ability to switch between characters on the fly, and as such, it needed to be at the heart of the central puzzles. While I still provided small moments where each character deals with challenges on their own, the main section of each level requires players to switch back and forth between both characters to move forward by, for example, passing an item between them.
-
When designing the boss battle, one challenge we faced was to drive home the sense of cooperative effort between our two main characters while remaining true to our separate yet overlapping journeys. To overcome that, we placed each character on a different arena floor. We had Cog as the one that would be directly facing the boss, while Pinion would be facing enemies upstairs and providing Cog with the means of damaging the boss.
