Time Chasers
Role
Puzzle Designer,
Programmer
Engine
Unity
Genre
Puzzle
Platform
Itch.io
Year
2023
Design Pillars
Mechanical
Elegance,
Cerebral Puzzles,
Tutorialisation
Time Chasers was developed as an exercise in prototyping, which means the design is focused on demonstrating the potential of the core gameplay. There was much restraint and minimalism when it came to adding new mechanics - instead, the key puzzle mechanic of time reversal in a 3d grid was thoroughly polished.
In designing puzzles around the mechanics and dynamics of this system, I was able to successfully create a balanced difficulty curve that gradually stepped the player through how the game works over more than 30 puzzle situations.
The Core Loop of the early Time Chaser levels is very simple, as can be seen here. The purpose of these levels is to get the player used to how one player's movement affects the other.
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In the onboarding stage of the first few levels, learning how the players affect each other is enough of a puzzle in itself. However, as the player grasps the mechanics, I needed to force them to use those mechanics in unique ways in the later levels, in order to keep the puzzles interesting.
To do this, I played with the player's expectations by repeating Phase 2 and 3 multiple times. As a result, the Core Loop began to resemble something more like this diagram:
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These gifs show two levels. The first follows the original simple loop of only needing to switch between player characters once. The second takes the same structure but applies the new loop to it by positioning the goal so that the solution now requires an extra movement phase (switching players, then switching back).
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This iteration on levels is not only helpful in designing, but also helps get players used to the mechanical edge cases by providing a familiar level with a twist. This is especially useful for less intuitive mechanics like this game’s rewinding.