Available to play online for FREE here: bradley-game-capstone.itch.io/almost-time
I developed Almost TI:ME as part of my senior game Capstone class with about twenty other students, and I served as lead programmer on the team. Almost TI:IME is a 2-3 hour top-down puzzle game developed in Unity for the web that revolves around time travel mechanics. As a lead, I managed a team of three core programmers and several others working on the project, coordinating with other leads to communicate problems and identify solutions. I programmed many of the game's core systems, and early in development I pitched the idea for a time resource system that would become the game's core mechanic: the time tether.
The time tether serves as a player-made checkpoint/savestate system, allowing players to drop points in time and space that they can jump back to (though some elements such as important items remain with the player). This is expanded upon later in the game with a stasis bubble mechanic, freezing objects in both time and space such that they will not reset when the player jumps back to a previous point.
The game's story follows a teenager named Margaux who has been left in charge of her parents' vast laboratory. Following an explosive accident involving the lab's generator, Margaux must use her parent's time travel technology to undo her mistake. She must traverse seven areas of the lab, navigating environmental hazards, evading dangerous creatures, and solving time manipulation puzzles to save the lab.
My contributions to the game include
- Representing the programming team for the project and coordinating with other project leads and our professor/producer David Abzug (formerly a designer at Volition)
- Pitching the central time tether mechanic and developing rapid prototypes to demonstrate it
- Guiding practices for coding standards and leading pre-production code structure planning
- Managing and delegating tasks during both pre-production prototyping and full development.
- Collaborating with other programmers to create an all-encompassing "RegisteredObject" approach to saving and loading state data for any objects affected by the time tether.
- Significantly guiding development and implementation of gameplay UI and visual effects
- Managing and prioritizing the list of bugs and issues (using GitHub's issue boards) to mitigate problems including blockers for the design team