AWAY: The Survival Series is an animal-based adventure game set in a distant, human-less future.

Narrated like a nature documentary, AWAY takes you on the Sugar Glider's journey across a decaying planet as you piece together the mysterious origins of your world.

Genre : Action/Adventure

Position : Tech Level designer & Game designer

Duration : Aug 2016 to March 2018

Platform : PC | PS4

Release Date : 2020

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CONTRIBUTION

Making organic level design in Unreal Engine 4 Editor

Building an immersive post apocalyptic world with mother nature who has taken back his rights.
Sculpting terrain to have a natural organic look and have interesting framing for player guidance.
Finding interesting way to play with avatar abilities (Climbing, Gliding, Jumping) in this world.
Making level design documents to organized environments, difficulties step up and mechanics introductions.

Designing, programming and integrating game systems

Prototyping avatar (3Cs) with walking, jumping, climbing (on trees), gliding navigation.
Designing and programming complex fire propagation system to create a fast paced level who the player have to escape a forest in fire.
- The system is constructed with firable objects (ex : trees) and fire trigger.
- When fire trigger expands & reaches firable object(s), then firable object(s) become another fire trigger.
- With this main logic, the level designer can build pacing and interesting fire propagation.
Making a Complex checkpoint system with a respawn logic. Work with open space associate with linear storyline.
(have to connect events to have a full game flow with saving system)

Setting up workflow in the engine project and design documents.

Setting up game wiki structure and documentations for teammates needs.
Finding solutions to have best practices for our small team (stay organized).
- Working on a naming convention.
- Working on level composition and assets organization to allow working access to other developers at the same time.
- Finding methods and best practices with past failure analysis. (Studio was at his starting)

And working on VR Experience

Our first project was to work on a flying locomotion system with HTC Vive controller. The goal was to avoid motion sickness, find our creative direction and have an photorealistic approach.

Player control a bearded vulture flying to escape natural disaster. Like a animal documentary, a narrator tells the course of the story.

The player can go up/down and go left/right and is on the back of the beast. He have to avoid some dangerous obstacles on his way.

GAME DESIGN

Design and script Character/Control/Camera in VR from prototype. The challenge was the motion sickness and have intuitive control to everyone.
Program controls in blueprint with roomscale position to get real movements of the player.

LEVEL DESIGN

Design from the forest beginning to fire transition. I made more than one path with difficulty variation.
Intentions was to feel lost to the player but always on the right track with trees density and the vulture companion.

SCRIPTING

Visual ambiance transition : blend fogs/lightning parameters in blueprint
Gameflow (cinematics integrations, restart at the end, etc)