Design Diary: Temporal Breach

Design Diary: Temporal Breach

05 May 2025

TLDR: We just released Temporal Breach, the second video game I made this year at university! Play as a vigilante breaking into a military complex that's researching time travel. Defeat enemies to collect dog tags and use them to activate time powers, from rewinding enemies to stopping time completely. Check it out free on Itch.io here!

We made Temporal Breach for a module titled "Professional Practice." We would be working with students from other courses to create a video game based on a brief from a local games company. While I had made plenty of games for previous modules, this was certainly a step up in terms of the professional expectations and the size of our team.

Our brief was to make a game featuring time control as a central mechanic. We explored many different ideas, including a Zelda-inspired dungeon game where you had to travel between two time periods, and a sidescrolling platformer where the area around your mouse could freeze time, but we ultimately landed on the idea that became Temporal Breach.

The concept began quite simply: I had the idea of putting Tracer from Overwatch into a top-down shooter. With her teleporting and rewinding abilities, I figured she would be really fun to play in a game like that, and it reminded me of the teleporting top-down shooter Mr. Shifty, which I had played a couple years back.

As we were discussing the other time powers our character could possess, we decided that they should be single-use pickups like the cards in Neon White, sometimes enemies will drop them and sometimes they can be found on the ground. When another team member, Ashton, suggested that they should be themed as dog tags, the whole idea really came together and I started to love it.

I was the leader of our team for this project. I had experience leading a team of 6 game designers in the previous project, but this time, I was leading a team of 14, including students across the Game Design, Game Art, Graphic Design and Music and Sound courses. It was definitely a big step up, but I felt I managed it quite well. I asked each course to elect their own captain, who could assign all tasks to the rest of their team. This worked really well and took a lot of strain off me.

As well as being the team leader, I was a game designer and level designer for this project. I designed the dog tag system, some of the player character and some environmental obstacles (though the only obstacle that we ended up using was the explosive barrel). I also designed levels 1, 3, 5 and 7, which were each intended to teach the player about one of the dog tags.

There was a moment partway through making this game that I realised that I had a different vision for it than most of the other designers. Early on, I was drawn to this idea of a "push and pull dynamic" between the player and enemies: the player would alternate between making forward progress and retreating behind cover when new enemies appeared. I pictured the game being slower paced and more tactical, like a top-down version of Rainbow Six or Gears of War. Other designers wanted the game to be very fast-paced, the player would move quickly, kill quickly, and die quickly. We settled it democratically and I was outvoted, which meant I had to redesign some of the dog tags that had been created with this "push-and-pull dynamic" in mind. I replaced the "push and pull dynamic" with a new core design pillar: "keep the player moving forward." This concept guided the entire redesign of the dog-tags system.

We began with five dog tags:

• Self-Reverse - The player activates the dog tag and travels back in time to a point up to one second ago.

• Reverse Bullet - The player activates the tag to gain a reverse bullet, the next enemy they shoot travels back in time two seconds.

• Slow Grenade - The player gains a slow grenade, which slows enemies in an area for a period.

• Time Shunt Bullet - The player gains a time shunt bullet, the next enemy they shoot is sent 3 seconds into the future. They disappear for 3 seconds before reappearing where they were.

• Inversion Shield - The player gains an inversion shield, when an enemy shoots it, the bullet is reversed back where it came from, hitting the first enemy in it's path.

Many of these did not fit our new design intentions. The Self-Reverse and Inversion Shield stayed, but each of the others were either changed or removed entirely.

• The Reverse Bullet became a Reverse Grenade, which reverses enemies in an area.

• The Slow Grenade became a complete Time Stop, which freezes all enemies and bullets for a short period.

• And the Time Shunt Bullet was removed completely, we realised that temporarily removing an enemy from the fight only acted to slow down the game.

So we ended with four tags in total: the Self-Reverse, the Inversion Shield, the Reverse Grenade and the Time Stop.

Since the player character could rewind themself, we decided to keep the actions the player could take to a minimum: move, shoot, dash and use dog tags. Because the player character is so simple, there isn't really much else to say about it, the real meat of the game is in the dog tag system.

The same is true for the explosive barrel. It's a big red barrel that explodes when the player shoots it, nothing you haven't seen in games before. The juice of the explosive barrel is how it interacts with the dog tags. When we began work on the game, we had some examples of interesting moments that we could include in the levels, one of them was for the player to reverse enemies until they were near a barrel, then shoot the barrel and kill them easily. Another interesting strategy that one of our playtesters discovered was to stand by a barrel to bait some enemies over, then reverse yourself and shoot it.

I also designed the tutorial levels for each dog tag. Honestly, I'm neutral on them, I don't feel they are as strong as my game design work. I think the tutorialisation is good but it sometimes comes at the cost of fun. At the start of this module, I found myself in a level design mood for the first time in 2 years, but I think I will stick to game design from now on.

Despite that, I really enjoyed reading Andrew Yoder's The Door Problem of Combat Design as research for the level design. The concept of positive and negative space Yoder describes was incredibly useful for me when considering how the player might move through our levels.

Overall, I'm really happy with how the game came together. It is by far the most polished thing I've made for a uni project, and I have our wonderful visual and audio teams to thank for that, as well as Ashton from game design, who found and implemented many of the VFX and particles. It's amazing how much of a difference the little things can make.

And that is my last module for year 2 done! It's absolutely flown by! I'm super excited to start year 3 in September, I already have a lot of stuff planned out and will probably start working on it over Summer. Now that I'm a bit more free, I'll hopefully also be posting more on the blog too. So keep an eye out!

Thanks,

CJ.