Emmanuel LATASTE

Game/Level Designer - Producer

Student Project - 3D Adventure Game
February - June 2019

Obside is a 3D adventure game on PC set in a futuristic fantasy. It was my 2nd Bachelor year project with a team of six. We were nominated at the 2019 Hitsplaytime student contest.

In-game screenshot

In our game, you play as a physically weak character who compensates for her weaknesses with the ability to control minds of entities around her. Our intentions were risk-taking and mind control all set in a systemic semi-open world.

We were nominated at the Hitsplaytime student contest. This allowed us to make new encounters with students from all over the France and have critical feedback throughout the evolution of our game.

We also had to create a devblog for the jury of the contest to follow our progress. This allowed us to better learn from our mistakes once the project was concluded.

You can have a glimpse of our progress during the development by clicking
on the button below to access our Devblog:

Medium - Devblog

With a first student 3D project of this scale it meant new challenges to overcome. Pipelines of production had to be adapted from our previous knowledge and we had the occasion to improve our process during the production when we transitioned to an HDRP project in Unity in the middle of the production.

For the level design the main challenge was set in the systemic environments and all the reaction loops between objects. We had to correctly introduce each object and it's effect on the world to the player, but we had also to ensure that the player couldn't use objects to get around our puzzles without any challenge.

To ensure the best playthrough we prepared all the systemic interactions and the macro scale before building levels. This to ensure we had a sufficient learning and experimenting pace for a 45 minute long experience including the final boss.

For the producing part the main challenge was to include an Indian student in our production pipeline and ensuring he was able to work in the best possible conditions with all members of the team independently from their level in English. It forced us to have good communication and documentation all along the project.