TimeZone
Year
2020-2021
Services provided
- Electronics design & fabrication
- Embedded software (C#, C++)
- Game design
- Motion design
Collaborators
TimeZone
TimeZone is a first-of-its-kind entertainment venue located in Providence, Rhode Island. Through an international cooperation of teams from the United States, the Netherlands and Belgium, we worked for over a year to construct this unique experience.
They contacted me at the end of 2019 to work out the electronic engineering and embedded software development for the project. It was certainly a challenge working with the US during the pandemic, but hard work prevailed and we were able to open doors in March 2021.
The Concept
TimeZone is an immersive, physical gaming experience with a time travel theme. It’s best described as a cross-over between escape rooms and Fort Boyard (Americans might be more familiar with Legends of the Hidden Temple). Players have a fixed amount of time to complete 25 challenges to try and score as many points as possible.
Each challenge is a “portal” to another point in time, and can be completed in somewhere from 1 – 5 minutes. Every portal can be replayed as many times as you want to set a higher score.
The big difference with escape rooms is that each game is self-resetting. No staff is needed to prepare a portal for the next group, and many groups can play at the same time.
25 game portals
Custom electronics, tens of thousands of lines of code
My role
First, I brainstormed with the team about possible game concepts, the overall theme, and technical possibilities.
Then came a phase of testing and prototyping the electronics and sensors. Prototype PCBs went from the breadboard stage to small-scale THT and SMD manufacturing in my reflow oven.
Ultimately I designed a highly modular electronic system composed of low-cost hardware. By engineering and fabricating custom circuit boards, different modules are made that can connect to buttons, sensors, and other human input devices. It becomes easy to develop new games by shuffling around these existing modular components.
The embedded software I made specifically for the project using .NET 5 and C++ and communicates with external APIs and web-based GUIs via JSON & WebSockets.
When the technical part of the project was done, I was able to offer my services in 3D motion graphics and UI design to further polish the product.
Some statistics
TimeZone was a huge coordinated effort and the numbers involved are slightly mind-boggling:
15
Circuit board designs
41
Raspberry Pi
42
Displays
84
Microcontrollers
125
Network connected devices
170
Circuit boards fabricated
203
Sensors
547
Buttons
41348
Lines of code