Fantasmagorie
Journey through a distorted puppet theatre held together by the fragile mind of a grieving puppet master. Take the stage as Viviette—a music box ballerina who's mysteriously free from the puppet master's control.
Team Size: 19
Role: Design Lead, Level Designer
Engine: UE5
Duration: Oct. 2024 - June 2025
Responsibilities
- Responsible for 5 designers
- Assigned tasks to designers through both Jira and Kanban methods
- Worked with department leads and project lead to plan sprints
- Worked with designers to create gameplay and camera story boards for each of the 3 levels
- Sketched map layouts and translated them into 3D with level designers and artists
- Responsible for Level 1: The Workshop (level design and most set dressing)
- Assisted with level design tweaks and set dressing across all levels
Gallery
The Process
Pre-Production
- Early on, we decided our goal for this project was to create something visually impressive, narrative focused, and polished; A daunting task for a 9 month project. We also knew that we wanted to keep our character’s main mechanic simple: use one tool to interact with several pieces in the environment. As the narrative shaped, we decided on the theme of fragility, in the sense of our main character’s porcelain body, the emotional state of the Puppet Master, and the destruction of the environment.
- We also had lengthy discussion about “moments”. We wanted to create a series of moments in our game that are cool, or scary. Something memorable that people can look back on and say “That was a really cool moment.”
Maps
As part of the preproduction phase, we created 2D maps and translated them into 3D using Blender. A small group of us (an artist, a few designers, and a programmer) sat together around one computer and using our character model, “played” through the 2D map by creating it in 3D using Blender geometry. This process allowed us to iterate on the 2D drawing quickly. We could see where areas felt awkwardly sized, or scrap and recreate entire sections.
Click or tap to view images
Organization
- One of our main struggles with organization was the asset list. We had too many different methods of organization happening at once, so I talked with artists and designers to create a spreadsheet that effectively met the needs of both departments.
- For task organization, I used Jira to assign tasks to myself and the designers for the majority of the project, switching to a physical Kanban board with sticky-notes towards the end for rapid implementation and bug fixes.
Production
After creating the whiteboxes in Blender, we imported those models into Unreal Engine 5 to begin tweaking and playtesting with our player controller. Having basic geometry to use as a guideline to build off of helped immensely with the whiteboxing process and allowed for us to focus more time on tweaking the geometry to our needs.
Storyboards
To make sure programmers, artists, level designers, and our cinematography owner were on the same page, I created a few storyboards covering important moments from each level and how they connect to each other. Doing this helped everyone to visualize what we needed to create. As we began implementing some of the artists work, I worked with our camera man to create a camera specific storyboard, which highlighted the specific angles and movements needed for our spline-based camera system.
Whiteboxes for Workshop Level:
Storyboard for the Backstage Level:
