Timelocked

One player is in the house in the late 1970s, the other is in the same house in the early 2000s. A death happened somewhere between the two, and neither player can solve it alone: what one of them can see, the other can only be told about, and items move between the eras through cracks in time. The whole design rests on that asymmetry. A puzzle only works here if it forces the two players to describe their own room accurately, so every object had to read clearly enough to be spoken out loud.

I was the product owner on a five-person team put together for the YZTA bootcamp. I owned the concept and the design document, wrote and prioritised the backlog, ran the sprint planning, and built the synchronised clock puzzle myself. Three sprints, and the honest account is in our own retrospectives: features were built in parallel and integration cost us more than the features did. That is the part of the project I would run differently, and it is the part I learned the most from.