Originally developed a press demo for the Oculus Quest at Oculus Connect 4, Time Stall was designed to bring out the best in room-scale standalone VR. In the full action-puzzle game, time is temporarily frozen whenever disaster strikes, leaving players to experiment with physics and find creative solutions by manipulating objects, diverting projectiles and combining various tools… Whatever it takes to save the ship and her Captain from destruction!
Retrospective thoughts
Time Stall holds a special place in my heart as the first title I worked on from its initial pitch all the way to final release. I am incredibly proud of the dense, highly polished interactivity we developed on early standalone VR hardware.
This project was also a major leap in my professional growth. It solidified my love for gameplay design, boosted my technical expertise in Unreal Engine, specifically in physics, modular architecture and optimization, and served as a proving ground for design leadership and mentoring.
Championed a systemic design philosophy, developing physics-driven interactions, player tools and emergent AI that defined the game's high bar for polished VR interactivity.
Throughout the development of Time Stall, I actively championed a core design philosophy: “Whenever the player performs an action and expects a reaction, the game should provide one.”
Action and reaction are key to creating immersive and satisfying gameplay, especially in VR. The philosophy had three main goals:
- Keep the player curious and creative in their solutions.
- Keep the player immersed.
- Provide the player with surprises for the sake of variety and fun
While the philosophy is simple, the complexity came from implementing it within several constraints – in this case, our limited resources, the technical challenges of mobile hardware and the limited 4x3m play area in each level. We achieved our rich interactivity despite these hurdles by:
- Managing expectations: We strictly managed player expectations by designing every interactive object with clear signifiers to avoid false affordances, employing consistent rules for size, shape and color to reinforce clarity.
- Using flexible physics systems: We developed modular, physics-driven systems that clicked together easily, allowing designers to build a rich set of interactions with Blueprints. While physics can be technically challenging, it gave objects natural affordances, allowing players to use real-world logic to solve puzzles creatively.
This approach is clear in the design of our interactive objects, like the champagne bottle which could be uncorked to fire at distant objects, and in the player tools. The magnet gun, for example, was built to provide the player with the ability to push or pull physics objects beyond the limit of the play space.
The perfect example of this systemic freedom is the “Space Bugs”. I initially struggled with their AI because traditional movement logic felt unresponsive and failed to meet player expectations.
After pivoting by making them simple spheres that moved using physics impulses, they started exhibiting organic, emergent behavior without requiring bespoke scripts. I fondly remember the first time I trapped one under a cloche and watched it “try to escape.”
This philosophy was the cornerstone of the project’s polished and rich interactivity. I’ve presented it to align our internal design team, and later had the opportunity to share our learnings externally, giving a guest lecture on the theory and technical implementation behind it.
Served as the Primary Game Designer, partnering directly with the Game Director to oversee additional responsibilities, like project planning, playtest analysis, UI, localization, performance optimization and junior design mentorship.
Spearheaded rapid prototyping to showcase unreleased VR hardware, establishing core gameplay logic and collaborating with the tech team to define production workflows.
Designed interactive ‘cinematics’ using Unreal’s Sequencer, seamlessly blending puzzle and interaction design with level design, while supporting animation in implementation, staging, and narrative.