Connection Beyond Time

Connection Beyond Time is a cooperative puzzle game where players must explore the same location at different times. Players will take on the role of either Past or Future, with the Past player manipulating the environment to aid the progress of the Future player. Players will cooperatively explore the house they are in to learn more about themselves and the connection their characters share.

Connection Beyond Time was developed by students at UC Santa Cruz's Games and Playable Media MS program in Santa Clara. As such, our team worked under a tight time restriction of six months to develop and polish the game to the highest degree possible. As it is right now, the game has just reached its final stages of development, and we are looking to deploy to the public.

Gameplay Walkthrough available here: 

We set out to make this game using Unreal Engine 5 to work with leading edge game development software. Since the engine was new to most of us, our biggest hurdle was our technical challenges. As such, the focus of our first sprint was to get the minimum requirement for the game to be 'functioning': two players in the same level instance. With the combined work of our team, we were able to accomplish that goal.

From there, we concentrically expanded our core gameplay, adding in interactable objects and refining the player controller. We decided to keep  the mechanics a single player could use relatively low, since the real depth of the game came from interacting between the players, as we saw numerous times in playtests.

To that end, our third sprint focused almost entirely on aiding player communication through a variety of means. We visually distinguished each room, so that players could convey their location. In addition, we also added a mechanic that let players 'ping' or place a visual indicator on a location they were looking at. These changes allowed players to overcome challenges that had previously impeded playtesters, not through hints, but by giving the players the means to negotiate the solutions that were already present.

As we neared the end of the pre-production period, our team devoted time to art and narrative, polishing the game a bit to help the gameplay shine stronger. As we looked forward to the production cycle, we hoped to focus not only on generating more content, but also filling out the story and environments so the game can shine in all aspects that we hoped to accomplish.

Production saw the generation of three floors of puzzles, mechanics, environments, and narrative, all weaving together in this cooperative experience. We told the story of a hopeful girl, aspiring to create games to inspire others the way she received her own impetus to create. Alongside her narrative, a woman, jaded from her experience in game development, learns to accept herself and her journey as a part of the process to reignite her own drive.

In our production phase, we knew the style we wanted to convey to the players as well as what our core gameplay should feel like. Tutorialization of a two player game became our focus with a blend of voiceover, forced interaction, and in-game messages. We wanted to blend our players into the world while also allowing them to teach each other through their own, unique perspectives.

As we close out this project, we reflect on the progress our team has made along the way. We can see that we've created a novel experience, refined it to its core ideas, and tried to bring the story to life in front of the players. Of course, with more time, we could have made more improvements, but, working with what we had, we were able to produce a solid cooperative game in Unreal Engine 5 with an hour to two hour playtime and solid polish.

Thank you for taking the time to read all the way down here. I hope you and a friend can play and enjoy our game. Let us know what comments you have down below, and we would be happy to discuss the game with you.

If you would like to download and play the game, you can access our latest build here: game download link. We will have a more official website soon as well as a Steam page.

Credits:

Zhenyi Wei - Creative Director, Art Director

Ben Rowland - Producer, Gameplay Programmer

Hanu Kancharla - Technical Director, Network Programmer

Jiaben Zhang - Narrative Designer

Winnie Wang - 3D Prop Modeler

Vishwaas Khare - 3D Environment Modeler

Sai Anirudh Yellanki - Network Programmer