DON'T DROWN
ROLE
Game Designer / Level Designer
DESCRIPTION
Don't Drown is a collaborative interdisciplinary project between six game designers and four artists of ISART DIGITAL Montréal.
Don't Drown was developed on Unreal Engine 5 during the 2023 Game Week in a total duration of one week.
YEAR
2023 | 4th year of study
GENRE
Survival / Strategy
PLATFORM
PC
SOFTWARE
Unreal Engine 5
Perforce P4V
GAMEPLAY
In don’t drown you play as a little girl stuck on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. Collect different items to build a raft that will allow him to leave this island. Beware! Hurry because the water rises and engulfs the elements..
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The controls of the character are simple : she can move, pickup items and drop them to build the raft.
This project was done during the beginning of my fourth year at ISART and it was so fun to experiment a first project with my graduation project team.
I really enjoyed working on several aspects of the game whether it’s LD, GD, balancing, VFX, environment, UI and much more !
LEVEL DESIGN
The first step of our level design phase was to find references.
Even if this is not exactly what we headed towards this allowed us to have a global idea of the construction of an island LD and its different layers.
Here are some references I could find, most coming from pinterest :
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Brainstorm & Task allocation
The second step of the level design phase was to brainstorm with Arnaud and Aris, the other two level designers and establish a working method and the distribution of tasks.
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It was quick but it allowed us to set up quickly.
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We decided to divide the level design into three parts.
In this way we could each advance on a part of the island while doing regular checkups every hour to three to keep a common thread.
Blockout
The third step of the level design phase was to make the blockout of the island in Unreal Engine. We kept the structure we decided and It turned out like this :
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We used rough shapes, placeholders and prototyping grid materials to make the blockout.
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I spent some time testing the different paths and the items placement to see if it was fun, dynamic and well balanced.
The fourth phase of level design was to implement the various LDOs, test all the paths and connections between them and implement the artists' assets.
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As is often the case, this was an exciting phase, as it was here that we saw the game come to life!
Here is the final look of my part of the island !
VFX
With the help of the Unreal Engine Niagara particle system, I made some VFXs for the game :
- When adding an item to the raft
- When the character lands on
the ground
- When the character moves
It was my first real experience with Niagara and I really enjoyed being able to get out of my comfort zone, create this type of content for the game and help with its final polishing.
REACTIVE ENVIRONMENT
To add immersion in the game, I decided to add reactive environment elements.
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For the grass I imported a package into the project that I then set up to make it work.
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For the bushes I created a physical asset from the FBX of the artists and I used with the physical parameters to give it the feeling we wanted.
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For the bushes I faced a bug that made the mesh clip when it was at the edge of the screen, after some research I knew how to deal with it and I corrected it.
