NEX TEMPORIS
Role
Level Designer - UI/UX Designer
Description
Nex Temporis is an immersive first person environmental puzzle game that revolves around time management mechanics.
Step into the shoes of a mysterious watchmaker: explore the map, search for gears, pointers and manipulate time to your advantage to repair all the clocks.
Genre
First Person Puzzle Game
Platform
PC
Engine
Unity
Development Analysis
This project, made in Unity, was given a 2-month time frame to develop a First Person Puzzle Game. One of the constraints given by the academy was that there had to be a watchmaker incorporated into the theme of the game.
Firstly, I recommended that the team collect references from games of a similar nature, such as Portal and The Talos Principle, as nobody in the team had much experience in this genre. In brainstorming, we all agreed to work on environmental puzzles that would really solidify the main theme of time.
After a lot of brainstorming, we decided that the core gameplay feature would involve time manipulation mechanics. The players would be able to rewind, fast forward, or stop the time time, with puzzles designed with these specific mechanics in mind. For example, placing an object in certain spots and changing its temporal positions to activate mechanisms, or turning a clock backwards to open doors.
The time-based mechanics demanded a lot of asset planning. In order to remain productive, we went with a low-asset environment where we reused and repurposed gameplay-related assets. This helped us manage the project's scope and keep on schedule.
I think one of the biggest challenges during production was always how to successfully integrate puzzles in the level design. I'm firm that levels should support gameplay, and it does take a good number of iterations to find this balance. It really was a rewarding yet difficult job to place these puzzles in the right way, to feel natural and intuitive.
With the UI, I was going for a minimalistic and clean design that referenced similar games in its look. Navigation through the menus was kept simple, with signs at the start of each level and in the middle of puzzles to help players progress in the right way, just like Portal.
Also, lighting was used in a major way to guide the player. The placement of lighting was planned for each of the levels, creating subtle paths to guide the player to essential areas naturally.
Further into development, issues arose with level verticality and scale. Levels felt disconnected and huge, and players did so much backtracking while carrying objects, which broke the flow of gameplay. As a solution to this, we used:
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Black holes: These enabled players to move objects quickly across the map.
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Interactive bookshelves: By manipulating time, players could elongate bookshelves to create ladders and solve vertical traversal puzzles.
In the end, I am proud of what we have accomplished. This project taught me a lot about teamwork, refining ideas, and balancing creativity with practicality. It improved my ability to work with others, to refine ideas, and to align them with my team's vision to achieve the best results.
What I Did & What I Learned
During this 2-month project, I took on responsibilities in Level Design and UI/UX Design, contributing to both the creative and technical aspects of development.
My key tasks included:
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Designing and prototyping blockouts to test and refine puzzles.
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Creating and implementing environmental puzzles directly in-engine.
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Create efficient blockout for the levels in-engine.
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Developing detailed wireframes for the game’s UI screens to ensure clarity and usability.
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Designing and setting up the lighting for all levels in-engine, enhancing atmosphere and player immersion.
This was my first group project where I extensively worked in-engine, specifically using Unity.
I significantly improved my skills in implementing models, creating layers, and setting up lighting to enhance the game’s visual appeal.
Additionally, I learned how to design wireframes for UI screens with a focus on clarity and player understanding. In hindsight, I recognize that menu navigation could have been further optimized.
This experience was invaluable in helping me understand teamwork pipelines and refine my time management skills to achieve the best possible outcomes within a collaborative environment.