What I did:
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Level Designer
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Whiteboxed the Music Box + Main Stage level using UE5; focused on player navigation, camera visibility, and environmental storytelling
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Owned majority of Vertical Slice level
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Depicted the culmination of the game's story through attentive placement of assets​​
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Made the game more engaging and kept a consistent ludonarrative through Mechanics and Encounter Design
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Collaborated with Art and Programming teams throughout development
Cinematographer
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Ensured a cinematic and engaging player experience through extensively iterated camera placement, movement, and angles.
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Learned and applied proprietary spline-based camera system
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Shot-for-shot planning, storyboarding
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Software: UE5, Blueprints
Brief explanation (from Steam page)
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.
Danger looms around every corner, filling the workshop, backstage, and stage of this theatre with perilous threats. With only a needle and thread by your side, you must swing, climb, and manipulate objects to progress, all while evading twisted and terrifying puppets along the way. Follow the guidance of a mysterious spirit to uncover fragmented memories from the past, revealing more about the one pulling the strings.
Level Design
The Music Box and The Stage​
This level is the culmination of the Puppetmaster's delusion, showcasing the depths of his sadness and despair. The game's theme of "fragile" was in constant focus.
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My goals for this level were to make a wholly fantastical environment for the player to move through, to provide a sort of endcap to the game with the interactions present in the Music box, learn more blueprinting and simple animation skills. I was also tasked with working on the first level with another level designer and our Design Lead.
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My goals for the player experience were to make the player feel generally uneasy and to provide finality to the game as a whole by providing the last story pieces and bringing the game to a close with a final confrontation with the Puppetmaster.
Initial Design and Blockout
This level began with the idea that the player would have to travel through some version of the Music Box. Using references of music boxes, I realized that I would need to use real music box construction as a base for the level - but it would need to be heavily modified to work in our game.
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The Stage section of the level needed to display different vignettes representing the Puppetmaster's Daughter's sickness and death prior to the events of the game. Several methods of swapping visual elements were discussed, with the fly-in + fly-out gaining favor for the semi-realistic aspects that could be pushed to fantastical limits, as well as ease of player navigation.
While it was decided early on that the player would travel through the Music Box, I had to figure out how they would do that - and in what direction. Upwards felt like the only appropriate direction, having the player essentially climb out of a distorted memory of happiness.
The Stage is the second part of the level, and would be the very end of the game. The Stage began as a puppet-box theatre, but eventually transitioned to a more realistic stage due to both time constraints and aesthetic/story reasons
A transition between the Music Box and The Stage was required, and I went through several versions of a bridge before I decided on a bridge of piano keys.
Finalizing The Level
While it is the shortest level in Fantasmagorie, it was also never meant to be particularly long. The level's goals are accomplished in a relatively small playspace, and focuses more on ambiance and content density over anything else. With the Music Box providing challenge and catharsis through fixing the Music Box itself, the Stage's job is to bring the game to a close and be a fitting set for the final confrontation with the Puppetmaster.
Vines were introduced late into development, to symbolize the Puppetmaster's delusions creeping through this reality and breaking the object most tied to the Puppetmaster's daughter - the Music Box.
The Music Box has no backdrop and seems to float in a void - this is not by accident. This specific Music Box is not necessarily real, and is meant to be a visual representation of the Puppetmaster's delusion.
As the culmination of the entire game, I needed to make sure that the final confrontation with the Puppetmaster was both visually appealing and gave the player exactly as much information as they needed. A very early idea for this was having the fake daughter sit atop a pile of roses.
Vertical Slice
This level was made to show our game's visual style, and allowed us to test the limits of our camera and gameplay. While the mechanics were not finished yet, this level let us figure out what worked and what didn't work while providing a clear visual target.
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My goals for this level were to provide space for finished art, show off the then-current state of gameplay, and push our camera system to the limit.
Cinematography
The spline-based camera tool was developed by our programmers specifically for me. It set the current spline when the player hit one of the two trigger boxes set for either end of the spline (0% and 100%), took the player's current location on the spline as a percentage on the length of it, and set the camera location to that part of the assigned level sequence (with keyframed camera positions in the level sequence).
I made all of the associated level sequences, placed all of the splines with their trigger boxes, and did extensive testing and iterating on both of these aspects.
It was important that the camera balance visual style and visual clarity at all times, so some areas required more work than others - specifically, any of the areas that allowed the player to explore more of the horizontal plane.
The Workshop
The beginning of the game needed to establish several things: who you are, where you are, and why you were there. With a mix of set dressing and my camerawork, we were able to showcase several aspects of the story up-front without the need for more dialogue than a couple lines. This level also allowed me to play with the camera's roll angle more than the other levels, as seen in the second video - I did this with the intent of making the player feel uneasy in their adventure.
The Backstage
This level contains camera movements not used elsewhere in the game - namely, the "Rigging Room" where the player runs away from the camera. This environment allowed me to play with scale and provide more dynamic camera motions than a simple side-scroll might. This level easily took me the longest time to set up the cameras for, as it is both the longest and most complex level for the camera.
The Music Box + The Main Stage
In the first half of this level, the camera follows the player up as they climb through the Music Box. At players walk along the piano bridge at the top of the Music Box, the camera pulls away to reveal the now-functional Music Box slowly playing the main theme. I wanted to show the player that they definitively fixed something, while also showing them that they are quite literally off-stage; floating in a void, there is no backdrop until the player happens on the Main Stage.
Unique Situations
Sometimes our camera system would either be extremely clunky or downright unsuited for a specific scenario. This was when I had to get especially creative. While the camera system made for me was quite robust (and exactly what I initially needed), sometimes I had to think outside of the box.
One such scenario was the "Moon Room" in the Backstage level - our camera system was designed for tight corridors and direct side-to-side movement, not the relative openness of this area. This section of the Backstage took the longest for me to set up in the entire game, even with the camera angles already planned out.
I was told by our lead programmer that I should never curve the camera spline. In the video on the right, you can see that I very clearly curved the camera spline.
I found that, if used improperly, a curved camera spline would cause the camera to move quickly and erratically - however, if the curve faced away from the player at all times, it could be used to give curved areas simpler and smoother camera movement!
