Cold Case: Time Paradox
Developer
Role
Software
Paradigm Interactive
Programming, Additional Design
Unity
About the Game
Cold Case: Time Paradox is a single-player, point-and-click investigation game with soft-time travel mechanics. All in-engine work was done by me.
"You enter a crime scene with many unknowns. The greatest clue and tool in your investigation is a time machine at the scene that sends you before the crime occurred. Uncover the mystery by manipulating the scene in the past to see how it affects the present."
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Designing a Scalable
Multiverse
In Cold Case, players interact with a crime scene before the crime takes place. They get to interact with three items, and their actions affect the outcome of the crime in the present. As one can imagine, there are a ton of different combinations that result in many different presents.
Each item in the scene contains an id, along with variant items that the original can spawn, such as broken or bloodied versions. When going to the present, a script compares recorded changes to the base condition of the room and applies the appropriate changes to the scene. When returning to the past, a script cycles through all active items and tells them to reset themselves, which can include recursive calls on spawned parents.
This system made it very efficient to add in new objects and outcomes during production, allowing my team to maximize the content in the game despite our limited timeline.