Chronoraptor

Isometric Puzzle solving time-travel game about recovering ancient artifacts stolen from throughout history by a time-traveling dinosaur!

Undergraduate Program final release, created over 9 months intending to challenge players to utilize time-traveling game mechanic to recover artifacts by completing puzzles made in the Unreal Engine.

Roles on Project Team: Lead Level Design and Lead Game Design

The player has the ability to rewind or fast forward time. Every time you travel backwards in time, a time-clone is created that will echo your previous actions. If you press a button and then rewind, your clone will now press that same button. This allows you to be in two places at once, enabling you to solve unique and interesting puzzles.

Time travel in games is tough (this project taught me that the hard way) but these are the lessons I learned in Game Design while learning about the difficulties.

Game Design

Time Travel within games requires certain laws to be broken in order for the Player to understand the mechanics

The first problem we had as a team was figuring out how to tutorialze the player on how the Time Travel even worked. Chronoraptor was designed as a Co-op single player experience, where you can use your previous iterations to complete puzzles and challenges. These were the first steps:

Limiting Clone number to 5, and showcasing that via UI
Highlight Clone to player in real time, so the player can see thier previous actions
Creating a Visual Color Language Document so that there would be consistency on in-world interactions

Implementation of level hazards, various puzzle object locations and challenges, as well as level specifictimers for the AI Raptor to appear and it's behaviour. In a game titled as such, the Raptor is an important aspect of the game, and designing it to feel strong against the player, but not unbeatable was difficult.

The Raptor is not effected by time travel, but will chase previous clones of yourself. The behaviour tree setup for the Raptor involves checking for most recent vs closest iteration of the player. Scripting for the Raptor behaviourand it's spawns within the levels were done by myself and a gameplay engineer on our team.

Chronoraptor Level 2 Blockout

Chronoraptor Level 2 Mechanic Pass

Chronoraptor Level 4 Final

Chronoraptor Level 2 Blockout

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Level Design

Throughout the 5 seperate levels each has a focal point and puzzle for the player to solve.

The premise being that the Raptor has stolen precious artifacts from history lends itself to an elaborate means of storytelling. The level design of each floor were a great vessel to slowly increase the difficulty and in turn, heighten the narrative suspense.

The 5 levels contained variations of longer more speed based challenges, more consice intricate throwing puzzles, hiding puzzles from the Raptor, and (my personal favorite) an Indiana Jones style laser grab and retrieve.

Each Puzzle had been documented within a Master Design Document where status of completion, feedback, and required tasks would be tracked. From simple block-outs to final products.