TIME TALKER

All formalities aside, as a solo developer I was in for quite a wild ride. I had to ensure that we went for a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). I also had to ensure that the focus points were on the things that would achieve our goals the fastest. 

​

Since I was also responsible for the planning I suggested to use convenient methods for everyone that are not complex but give a lot of insights such as Trello, Discord and Excel sheets. 

​

After having made a priority list based on MoSCoW I had to implement various mechanics. Each mechanic will be explained briefly.

​

Dialogue System.
The dialogue system was one of the most important features since it was a story driven game. I created a tool for it through scriptable objects. In this tool you can choose who says what and the line. Then you can drag a dialogue object to any other game object in the scene. If it is an item or interactable it will automatically trigger the dialogue. It can be triggered only once or multiple times if you desire so. The system shows the dialogue for an x amount of seconds based on the average character reading speed. 

​

Inventory System.

Both players could collect and inspect items for lore, puzzles, and progression. The inspection part however was dropped due to lack of time. The inventory was a dynamic bottomless inventory with in mind that players could choose to rearrange it if they wanted. This was due to us having plans for quick slots in the UI. However this feature was also dropped due to lack of time. The backend however is fully prepared for such an expansion. 

​

Items.
Items could be collected and dropped. Some items however when dropped could be picked up by the player in the future. But if the player in the past picks up the item then it should be removed from the inventory from the player in the future as the "drop" never happened. I wanted the items to be easy to add, so I gave options per item such as name, description, type etc. Some items unlock things whole others don't. Due to this the item system became quite big. 

​

Interactables.

This was a broad term for anything that couldn't be picked up. For example mentioning the ventilation shaft, trying to unlock a door etc. 

Interactables could also unlock other things for sequential progression. Anything that was linked to it that derives from the unlockable interface would be unlocked after interaction. Interactables would also teleport players for example from the world to the bunker. The entire game is made in 1 scene, this is to avoid loading times.

​

Nature.

One of the most important aspects in the game was the world progression, for example when you plant a plant seed in the past that it would show in the future at the same location with maybe a little offset depending on the height of the future terrain. It would also show some grass and less pollution. We also wanted to add insects and animals if we had more time for it. But we had to make everything apart from the animations by ourselves. For a team of 6 we were very busy with the tasks at hand that were more important. There is also a plantable zones system in place. This means that plants can only be planted at certain places for a massive effect. These places would be marked in the future as places with minimal nature. 

​

New Input System.

In order to have Cinemachine work properly with the controller and keyboard and mouse we had to use the new input system. I had only worked with it once, so it was a challenge to get it up and running. I had to fine tune a lot of things and eventually create some work around methods to fix some issues which introduced other issues. Inverted controls, motion sensitivity etc. Most were eventually fixed though.

​

There were some more smaller sub systems in place such as multiplayer (local split screen), event system, sequential puzzles, unlocks, and triggers.