What I did:
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
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.
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.
Make the player feel generally uneasy and to provide finality to the game as a whole
Provide the last story pieces and bring the game to a close
Initial Design and Blockout
This level began with the idea that the player would have to travel through some version of the Music Box.
The Stage section of the level needed to display different vignettes representing the Daughter's sickness and death prior to the events of the game.
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 is 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
The level's goals are accomplished in a relatively small playspace, and the focus is on ambiance and content density. The Music Box provides challenge and catharsis through fixing the Music Box itself, and the Stage's job brings the game to a close as 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.
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 to use.
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.
The Workshop
The beginning of the game needed to establish who you are, where you are, and why you were there.
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 took me the longest time to set up the cameras for, as it is both the longest and most complex level.
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. As 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. The intent is to show the player that they are fixing things while floating in a void almost outside of the game's world.
Unique Situation
By default, the camera spline couldn't curve without errors; but I found a couple niche uses for it anyway.
If the curve faced away from the player at all times, it could be used to give curved areas simpler and smoother camera movement.
