Last spring at the Entertainment Technology Center, a team of graduate students spent their final semester asking: what happens when the phones in a room stop being separate windows and start working as one?

Big Picture Studio, a student pitch project advised by Dave Culyba, is a cooperative puzzle game played across as many as four networked phones. Instead of tapping through a single screen, players progress by physically connecting, rotating, and rearranging their devices, turning a tabletop of phones into a shared picture that shifts as they move.

The idea traces back to an improv exercise in the ETC’s first-semester core curriculum. Students each received a piece of one massive, Where’s-Waldo-style illustration and tried to reconnect the drawing by describing their fragments aloud, without peeking at anyone else’s. Programmer and game designer James Huang carried that spark into a pitch, and the team layered on inspirations including Gorogoa, the 2017 puzzle game built from sliding comic panels, along with the modular Sifteo and Cube World cubes.

What tied those references together was a shift in how the team treated the screen. “We’re really activating the framing device, instead of just letting it act as a window into the experience,” said Skye Gao, the project’s artist. Phones were the natural canvas. “We were looking at phones from the get-go, because everyone has one, and we’re mostly familiar with the rules of it,” Gao said.

Early on, the team weighed a board-game version, with each phone acting as a top-down room in a heist, against a more fluid, narrative-driven puzzle. They chose story. Game designer Samantha Lai mapped out a structure around a few core interactions, and Gao illustrated the world as an animated comic book. At the same time, 3D artist Ian Accetta designed and constructed the 3D scenes and rendered camera-movement animations to represent the players' journey. The finished experience splits into navigation, where players pinch phone edges together to explore a 3D scene, and puzzles, where 2D memories and flashbacks bend the rules.

That is where playtesters found their favorite moment. Two phones joined along one edge reveal a clock face whose hands pivot at the seam. Rotate a phone, and the hand turns while the face stays put, and the puzzle is to land on a specific time. “There’s a sense of how a phone works baked into our understanding,” Gao said. “To see an experience play on that was exciting for people.”

Designed to be played shoulder to shoulder, the game leans on a kind of small magic: phones that are not supposed to be together come together to reveal something whole. The team graduated in May, and for now the project lives in their portfolios, though Gao has not ruled out a return. “If we get funding, we can come together and pump out a more polished, more condensed version.”

When Four Phones Tell a Story

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