The Scripting and Polish of It's About Thyme


Hey, this is Weston and I was the primary scripter for It's About Thyme!

With the core mechanic of the game being switching between the same area at different points in time, it was important that both the past and present version of the level lined up with each other. While the level designers concerned themselves with that aspect of the design, I was focused on the interaction the player would have between the two different periods of time. 

Initially, both 'timelines' were directly on top of each other and would be disabled/enabled depending on which time zone the player was in. This worked for us at first but soon we realized we wouldn't be able to manipulate objects in the opposite time zone from the player because it was disabled. Something else we had problems with related to this setup was that the player was able to clip inside of walls and colliders while switching time zones.

To fix this problem, I separated the levels from each other and enabled them for the entire duration of the game. To ensure the player couldn't swap timelines while they were overlapping with something in the other timeline, I had a collider in the other timeline match the position of the player in their current timeline. If that collider was overlapping with any other colliders in its timezone, the player is not able to switch timezone. To do this, I had to track the spawn point of the player in each timeline and get the distance between the spawn points to calculate where the player would be in the opposite timeline. 

Interestingly, we actually started with an more complicated version of the same system before switching our base concept and adopting the system that ended up not working. This initial system used portals to transfer between timelines and would change the player's rotation while traveling through based on the orientation of the connected portal on the other side. The game was also split screen at this point, displaying both timelines at the same time. While this system was fully working, we found it was too cluttered and to confusing, so we opted for the more toned down concept you see in our final game.

Aside from that, I mainly worked towards polishing the animations and interactions of the player in the scene. A lot of this work involved developing the ground/wall detection of the player in the scene, along with the general controls of the player.

Get It's About Thyme

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