NEX TEMPORIS
FIRST-PERSON PUZZLE GAME
ABOUT
Nex Temporis is a first-person puzzle game developed around an academy-assigned theme that required introducing a unique game twist. Out of four possible options, me and my team were given the "mechanic" one which we reinterpreted as a watchmaker. The twist is that the watchmaker enters the clocks to repair them, with the gameplay taking place within their internal spaces.
To progress, the player must manipulate time to solve puzzles and the mystery behind the three clocks that need to be fixed, each belonging to a different person.
ROLE
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Level Designer
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Narrative Designer
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Technical Animator
PROJECT BREAKDOWN
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Made with Unity
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Developed in 10 weeks
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Created for Midcore players
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Optimized for PC
TRAILER
DEVELOPMENT
The development of Nex Temporis began with a brainstorming phase focused on reinterpreting the assigned theme in an original way that led to the idea of the watchmaker with time-manipulation abilities.
The player can rewind, pause, or fast-forward time, with each temporal state altering the entire structure of the levels including puzzle objects such as gears and clock hand, and environmental elements like broken floors and walls. These features serve both as tools and obstacles, making level design a critical part of the challenge.
Each level’s goal is to gather puzzle objects and place them correctly to solve it. The player is always followed by Manny — a companion entity that shows the current time state and puzzle progress through a watch interface.
A major design challenge was ensuring that necessary items and accessible paths coexisted within the same time state. To solve this, we implemented a structured time logic divided into three states:
To keep things manageable, we went for a low-asset approach by reusing and tweaking existing gameplay elements. This helped us stay on track, keep a consistent look, and focus more on designing the actual puzzles.
Nex Temporis features three core puzzle types:
The game includes a tutorial and three main levels. To tie everything together, we designed a central HUB: a room featuring a giant Master Clock into which each repaired clock is inserted. Once all clocks are restored, the game concludes with a cutscene that unveils a narrative twist. From this HUB, players can access all individual clock levels and progress through the game.
MY ROLE
During this project, I took on three main roles in addition to contributing to the development of core mechanics and gameplay:
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I designed and built one of the game’s levels;
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I wrote the entire narrative which included the story, dialogues and cutscene;
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I animated all in-game elements;
LEVEL DESIGN
As mentioned earlier, level design was a major challenge in Nex Temporis. I wasn't just meant to design static layouts — I had to plan how each space would shift over time, paying attention to the elements that would change, disappear, or break in the time states shifts.
My main responsabilities were:
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Sketching and building layouts that supported puzzle ideas;
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Setting up the puzzle zones inside the level;
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Running tests and making changes based on player feedback;
I started my process by sketching a potential layout that could serve as a starting point for both "timelines". Then, I imported the layout into Procreate and used layers to draw over it to better visualize the difference between one state and the other. This way, I could also easily check if the transition between states worked.
After building the level in engine, early testing made me notice it was too big — players would often get lost or spend too much time backtracking while carrying objects which broke the intended gameplay flow and pacing I had planned.
To solve this, me and my team introduced two key mechanics that became central to the final level design:
Interactive Bookshelves
Through time manipulation, players can shift shelves and its books to form staircases, supporting more vertical puzzle design.
Black Holes
Storage points that absorb carryable items from the player, reducing unnecessary travel.
After that first big iteration, I decided to divide my level into three main sections, each containing one puzzle. Initially, only the first area is accessible; once that puzzle is solved, the next section unlocks. This structure helped reduce player disorientation by limiting the playable space at any given moment.
NARRATIVE AND ENVIRONMENTAL STORYTELLING
From the beginning, my team and I decided that Nex Temporis would have a strong narrative component, with a final plot twist that would completely change the player's perspective.
The goal of the gameplay was to create a deeply immersive experience, where the player wouldn’t initially question the meaning of their actions, only to feel guilty once their true role was revealed later on.
To start the narrative process, I created a document and began writing down every idea that came to mind. I developed three interconnected characters with shared backstories - one person for each clock:
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Client 1: John, the father;
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Client 2: Lucy, the daughter;
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Client 3: Robert, the maternal grandfather;
As the player progresses, they slowly uncover their story:
Lucy’s mother died years ago, and her grieving father increasingly becomes obsessively attached to Lucy. She has been homeschooled but wants to attend elementary school. As she gains independence, her father’s possessiveness turns to anger.
On Lucy’s birthday, a fight erupts between John and Robert about her schooling. John, overwhelmed by grief and fear of losing Lucy too, drives recklessly in the rain, causing a crash.
They don’t die immediately but remain trapped between life and death — where the player’s story begins.
That is the game’s twist: the player takes on a role of a silent entity guided by a mysterious voice throughout the levels — the voice of Death. The player is not actually fixing clocks, their actions lead to the end of the client's lives. The whole experience is a kind of trial to prepare the player to become the new Death, because the current one is old, tired, and ready to retire.
The clocks symbolize each character’s remaining time. The player’s role is to restart the clock so their time can run out.
Once I had a clear picture of the story, I began implementing it into the game in various ways:
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I placed pages across the levels that give clues about what happened to each character;
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I wrote and voiced all the dialogues and monologues, entirely in English;
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I designed, edited, and implemented the final cutscene in-engine, where Death congratulates the player and passes on the role;
I wanted level design and narrative to be deeply intertwined but unfortunately, due to time constraints, we weren’t able to implement everything I had imagined. If my team and I had had more time, I would have changed the levels in this way:
JOHN'S LEVEL
A dark space with unreachable glimpses of light — symbolizing his desperate desire to reunite with his wife. That would be cracks in the environment, reflecting both the car crash and his the loss of his wife. His level would also contain personal items tied to his past and present to give clues about his everyday struggle with grief.
LUCY'S LEVEL
A colorful environment reflecting her innocence and excitement about starting school. The environment would also show cracks representing the crash and the emotional wounds caused by her father’s anger and her mother's death. An object belonging to her grandfather would appear as a comforting symbol, representing her only safe refuge within the family.
ROBERT'S LEVEL
This was meant to be the most complex and creative level. Robert was starting to have Alzheimer’s, and time shifts would reflect not only gameplay changes but also his fading memories — like a once-intact object from the past being broken or missing in the future.
I wanted each clock to mirror the mind of its owner and reveal their deepest emotional wounds. Even though not all the ideas made it into the game, I’m proud of the depth we achieved with the time we had.
TECHNICAL ANIMATOR
Since Nex Temporis was based on reusable assets, my team and I wanted to bring the game to life by making everything inside the clocks feel dynamic. That’s why one of my tasks was to animate the entire game environment: from books and bookshelves to floors, walls, and gears — I animated everything that moves inside the levels.
To begin, I learned how the timeline provided by our programmers worked, placing keyframes to control the objects’ positions over time. My goal was to avoid repetition so that no animation looked the same.
The broken walls presented the biggest challenge: I tried to simulate a physic system myself. I imagined how each piece of a wall could fall apart and land on the ground, fitting together in different ways to keep the animations interesting and varied.
I also animated all the books and bookshelves in the game, designing book stacks in creative ways to build vertical paths that the player could follow.
Through the animation process, I learned how a moving element naturally draw the player's eye, so I kept this principle in mind: my goal was to make the animations feel like a meaningful part of the level design, not just visual effects — every movement had to serve both function and atmosphere.
WHAT I LEARNED
In the end, I truly loved working on this project and could have happily spent more weeks on it. The core idea immediately captured my interest, and during the first days, I couldn’t think about anything else but the story and how it could connect with the level design.
Thanks to this project, I improved my skills in many different ways:
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Being my first experience as a level designer, I learned to work from macro to micro perspective starting from a level that was too big, then fixing my mistakes by dividing it into zones and focusing on each zone and its puzzle;
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I learned to use Unity to create blockouts and discovered through trial and error some key level design principles;
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I learned how to collaborate and communicate within a "big" team, this being my first experience working in such a setting;
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I learned to design levels that combine gameplay and narrative by reflecting the characters’ psychology and stories, improving my ability to tell stories through level design;
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I learned how to balance my ideas with what was realistic, and when to change or let go of things because of limited time or resources;
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I learned to animate in Unity and bring the level objects to life;
I am truly excited and ready to bring everything I’ve learned into future projects—especially my own personal ones, where I have many narratives I want to express through the environments I create. This project has been a turning point for me, the launchpad that made me realize how important it is for me to tell stories through level design.