With the recent news that The Robot Split in Time is heading to GDC, I wanted to take some time to look back over the game's development. And what better place to start than at the very beginning?
All the World's a Stage: The Original Prototype
Way back in the winter of 2018, a series of rapid prototypes were developed as part of a Game Design course. One of these prototypes, which is pictured above, was a simple little platformer called All the World's a Stage where you could jump back and forth between the foreground and the background to solve puzzles.
This original idea was that you were an actor in a play where things kept going wrong, so you had to keep moving in and out of backstage to fix things so that the show could go on. Hence the original title All the World's a Stage.
I was responsible for originally coming up with and implementing the game's main mechanic of swapping across the layers. In fact, being the only programmer on our very small team at the time, I was responsible for implementing all of the systems in this prototype.
Looking at the prototype, you can already start to see many of the mechanics that still exist in the latest version of the game. Buttons and doors, of course, as well as crates that you can push around and moving platforms. The red diamonds eventually became the electrical hazards in later versions. The key mechanic from this prototype, however, were the colored rings that you could swap through, toggling the tangibility of blocks of the same color, allowing you to stand on them or walk through them as needed.
There were many, many prototypes that were made during this time. Not all of them were given the opportunity to continue development, but ours was, and that's where the next part of this story comes in.
C.A.R.L.: The Polished Prototype
When spring of 2018 rolled around and development on the prototype continued, our team gained some new team members: Another designer, a musician, and, most importantly, a couple of artists. Now, our game, now named C.A.R.L., truly had a chance to shine.
With our new mechanical art style, our story also changed. Now, you're a lonely little robot named C.A.R.L. (Cross Axial Range Leaper) who's on a quest to find love. It was this quest that gave the game its new name: C.A.R.L. (Can A Robot Love).
Many new mechanics were also implemented for this prototype. A basic checkpoint system was established to prevent the player from starting over anytime they fall and die. We also added a hologram to the robot that shows where he would end up were he to swap at the moment. Larger mechanics that were added included a duplicator that let you take an object on one layer and make a copy of it on the other and a paddle wheel that you could swap through to make it spin, causing other platforms nearby to also rotate.
If you're interested, the final version of this prototype can be played here.
At the end of the semester, our polished prototype of C.A.R.L. was awarded the People's Choice Award at MSU's GameDev Student Showcase. Our game seemed to have a lot of potential, so we decided to revisit it once more.
The Robot Split in Time: The Game's Final Form
The fall of 2018 marked the beginning of the final round of development for our game. With three more artists joining the team, we were no longer working on a prototype, but a fully-fledged game.
Many changes to the game were made during this time. The duplicator and paddle wheel were both cut, as was the checkpoint system. Instead, we decided to make the game two-player, where each player controlled a different version of the same robot, who was split across two different times. You can probably see where the name The Robot Split in Time came from.
Despite his new model, the robots were still the same lonely C.A.R.L. as in the previous prototype. Left all alone with other robots in a space station where all the humans disappeared because of a strange time anomaly, C.A.R.L. is left to explore the area with only his other self and some of the other robots to help.
Some of the newer mechanics that we added during this time include a large cleaning robot that you can ride as it looks for garbage, some robotic plants that you can water (or "de-water," if you want) and grow by dragging them to the future, and robotic terminals that you can plug into to control certain platforms.
A lot of love and hard work went in making this game over it's year-long development cycle. And now, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the game's original creation, we are now putting on the final finishing touches in preparation of GDC. What an incredible journey it has been.
The most recent version of The Robot Split in Time can be played here.
It's kind of funny how, in the end, this game that was originally about a stage is now going to be showcased on one.
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