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Out And About

Project Summary

Level Design | Level Art

Pitch

Explore nature, identify and gather plants & fungi, cook recipes and herbal remedies and sell them on the farmers market - all while bringing the community together and turning a damaged coastal town into a foodie paradise.

Technical sheet

Team Size: ~10 people

Platform: Nintendo Switch / PC / Xbox

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Duration: 9 months

My Contribution

Responsibilities

  • Design of 2 majors areas of the game and the outside of player's house

  • Benchmark for real life natural accuracy

  • Linking Narrative Design into the game world

Skills

  • Level Design

  • Benchmark

  • Documentation

  • Game Design

Solution To Problematics

Issue

  1. We need areas to be memorable, unique and repayable                               

  2. On Kickstarter the team announced a character in wheelchair, how to make town accessible?                                        

  3. Progression after the storm destroyed most of the game world

Solution

  1. The areas I worked on are a beach, a grassland with an abandoned farm and the outside of the player's house, devasted by a landslide. To make them unique, not only by visuals, I needed to do many researches on foraging and on how nature works, which helped me create areas with different points of interests and different use for players                                                                                         

  2. To make it believable on our town, which is typically on the sea front and constructed on a cliff, I had to do a lot of accessibility researches about how to make a town wheelchair friendly. Since the game doesn't have infinite budget, we finally decided to add multiple stairlifts in town instead of rebuilding and adjusting most of it.                                      

  3. To create a satisfying progression with the map's restoration, we needed to link most places to characters and find believable ways to block access to certain parts of the game to players. To achieve that, we created several landslides, fallen trees, and destroyed buildings like an old windmill in the farm area​

2D Topdown Level Design

I will only detail the grasslands' area

The Grasslands

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Steps Of Production

1st 2D Iteration

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Undetailed

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Detailed

Plant Distribution

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3D Sculpting

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What I learned

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Natural authenticity

In order to create these spaces, forests and natural aspects of the game, I made a lot of research from the type of each plants, it's proximity with other areas, water, elevation, wildlife and climate change

Navigation and POI

It is important to guide the player using vegetation and terrain but remain naturally accurate. Guiding the player to foregeable zones and Points Of Interst is important to not loose or bore them. Especially since this is a farming game where players go multiple times to the same regions

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Environmental storytelling & progressions

In the game, environment tells a lot about the region. The game takes places after a huge storm and players will be able to unlock areas and activities with time. Showing them options and the damage of nature in the map helps with immersion. There are multiple seasons in the game which means that the map's visuals change over time and structures are upgraded

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