Todd The Technician

A reality-hopping, 3D, first-person, escape-room-style puzzle game.

Todd the Technician is a reality-hopping, 3D, first-person, escape-room-style puzzle game. You play as Todd, starting his first day at the Anomaly Corporation, working as a technician on the Window to Alternate Reality Project (W.A.R.P.). Your job is to fix different sections of the W.A.R.P. machine by solving puzzles with the help of A.N.D.I., your AI assistant. Fixing the machines grants you the ability to jump between new and strange realities. In the process, you will collect strange tools that help you to keep progressing on your increasingly strange repair journey.

Jump into the world of Todd the Technician and see if you have the skills to be a W.A.R.P. machine Technican!

Trailer and Walkthrough

My Role and The Team

I worked on a team of 6 to design and develop Todd the Technician. While being on such a small team ensured we worked on a variety of aspects of the game, we each also focused on a primary task. My focus was programming and production, which meant I designed numerous puzzles and mechanics and implemented them from concept to completion. I also iterated on user feedback and coordinated with artists to create assets and effects that matched the mechanic's intended feel.

The team at our capstone fair.

Iteration and Problem Solving

In Todd the Technician, the player can travel between realities by using the W.A.R.P door at the centre of the room. I designed a mechanic that could easily load multiple different scenes (each one representing a different reality). The door could unload and reload different combinations of two realities, allowing for seamless travel between them if the player walked through the portal. This was done as a preemptive change to prevent lag, as I expected that either storing all realities in a single scene or loading all scenes at once would cause significant performance issues later in development.

Because this was a puzzle game, I also designed a system that would allow players to pick up and interact with objects, to carry them around, put them down in a new place or use them in a puzzle. You can even carry them between realities, then unload the scene and reload it, and they’ll be exactly where you left them. This was done through a sophisticated GUID-based saving system that stored each object's stats and states in a JSON file for later access.

An incomplete version of the robot personality puzzle.

A complete version of the puzzle with the robots all happy!

The team conducted multiple rounds of playtesting, usually timed, monitored playtests that helped us gauge which parts of the game were causing them the most trouble or were maybe too easy. We often learned a lot from their actions, but just to make sure, we usually included a short survey/questionnaire at the end where the player answered a few questions about their experience and left some open feedback. The feedback often led the team to revisit some mechanics, making changes to make them more intuitive and better match players' expectations.

Tools and Realities

In each reality, we designed the puzzles and their respective tools to fit the theme, better immersing players as they traverse the WARP Network. In Normal, it’s simple repair tasks and gamified HR onboarding with your trusty screwdriver; in Noir, it’s solving a murder mystery with an ultraviolet flashlight; in Spooky, it’s conducting seances and cleaning ectoplasm with a ghost capture gun; and in Sci-fi, it’s dealing with emotive robots and circuitry using the hacking tool.