The Long Way Round

Overview

The Long Way Round is a first-person puzzle thriller released on Steam by Runic Studios. As the only programmer on a team of five, I built every system in the game, from player movement and interaction through to puzzle logic and game flow.

What I built

• All gameplay programming and scripting in Unity and C#

• Puzzle and interaction systems that drive the game's reality-bending events

• The game's structure and flow from first scene to ending

• Version control and team workflow on GitHub

Challenge: scope without a plan

We went into production without a detailed plan, and as new ideas came up mid-development the scope grew. That feature creep left parts of the codebase messier than I wanted. Before release I stripped back anything the game didn't need and tidied the systems that stayed, and we shipped a stable game on Steam.

The biggest lesson I took away was to scope and plan systems up front. I now bring that into every project.