Team : 9
Position : Game/level designer, pitcher
Duration : October-February
Attuned is a third-person action-adventure game where your abilities and movements depends on the type of terrain beneath your feet, seeking eternal life in desolated ruins.
Attuned was the pitch I proposed to the students and teachers at my second year at the ENJMIN of Angoulême. After it was selected among others to be one of this year’s end project, a team of nine was created and we worked together for four month in order to make a real game out of the pitch.
It took the form of a vertical slice, blending exploration and platforming, you are a forsaken priest able to harmonize your inner frequencies with the elements you touch, which enables you to gain new powers.
Gameplay-wise, your movements and actions depends on the type of terrain you’re in contact with. Walking upon Rock allows you to dash and destroy elements, while standing upon Sand allows you to jump much higher.
Please enjoy the full walkthrough of the game in the latter video.
You imbody an forsaken priest, trying to connect with her deeper self and the world around her as she constantly attunes with the environement around her. Her quest is both a spiritual and a personal one, as she tries to attune herself with the wind.
We developped the game on Unreal Engine 4.21, aiming toward the daredevil profiles, the explorers enthusiasts and the elementalist daydreamers, eager to provide an experience fulfilling the element-bending fantasies of our potential players.
The experience of Attuned stands between exploration and plateforming, as we try to keep the balance between viscerality and awe. This ongoing end-school project stands upon three main intentions :
-A primal connection with the environement
-A movement-driven gameplay and story
-A spiritual speech toward eternal life
Because we basically need a ‘new’ set of camera, controls and characters for each terrains, those elements where paramount. It was like creating four games in one.
We however were focused to keep the idea of an substractive design guideline, developping the primal core of the game and the full potential of the terrain mechanic in order to keep a experience that is elegant and simple.
We built our final level design upon the iteration and test of atomic situations reuniting our terrain features, allowing us to select the most strikefull.
The image above represents a scene in U.E. 4. where we started greyblocking atomic situations related to the water terrain. This way, we are able to have a heuristic approach in our design perspective.
In order to make Attuned the best experience possible, we defined two main emotional pillars (Sense please and Discovery) that united what we wanted the player to feel in our game.
We then subdivised them into atomic elements related to spaces carrying our intentions.
In parallel, we decided that we wanted a certain level structure, which was abstracted in a nodular graph and served as the base of our level design process.
We then blended the key-elements with the structure in order to make sure our experience was balanced and that the emotions we wanted to share with the player were embodied in the very spaces we then build. With a clear mind and a powerfull vision, we were able to gain a huge amount of time, knowing precisely what we wanted to achieve with our work.
We also went rational. To construct our playground and because we wanted each area of the zone to be unique, we rationalized our gameplay and environmental elements and then reassemble together in a rational perspective.
Greyblocking was then possible and we carefully executed our vision in engine, iterating and playtesting in parallel to aim at the better result possible.
In order to have more informations about the project, please enjoy the final presentation of our project (ENJMIN - February 22 of 2019) I made alongside my team-mate Thomas.
Please enjoy our final trailer in order to dive deeper into the world we built.