The narrative design was an important bit of the initial concept as well: as part of the discovery dynamic, we wanted the players to put the storyline back together bit by bit, and uncover the veil of what had happened to this place. My colleague Nicolas R. was lead narrative designer and writer on the project, and as such he gave the overall direction, and wrote the scenario for the game. As supporting narrative designer, I then pieced together the story beats and designed the contact points, to decide how we would allow the player to apprehend the story.

Our main way of conveying the story was another important feature of the game: the glyphs. We decided early on that we would like to have a cryptic alphabet in the game, taking inspiration from Tunic and Chants of Sennaar among others. The aim was to crypt the rough history of the world through an unknown language, and have the player find words to translate bit by bit ; we also wanted to give every perk a glyph translation, so that narration would come out through these convoluted ways as well. In the end, even if the complete mechanic didn't make it into the vertical slice, this dynamic drove us through the whole narrative process.

Due to time constraints and cut necessities, we had to rescale our ambitions and find another way to bring the story to the player ; in the final build, the history of the world is conveyed through various interactions in the environment, dialogues with NPCs and, most importantly, fragments of intradiegetic text that can be found scattered across the world, as glyphs.

The level design was meant to be a crucial part of the game; we wanted a focus on discovery and exploration, and for the player to have a real sense of curiosity for the world that was offered to them. In order to achieve this, we chose to go for an open world, that would feel less restraining than separate rooms with transitions in between. Of course, this posed several challenges, on a technical and an artistic level amongst others. 

In all of these steps of design and decision-making, as the Lead Level Designer, I kept an overview of the final level design and the navigation dynamics, and settled debates when it was necessary. With some help from my colleagues Alexis and Nicolas R., iteration after iteration, little by little, we had this world take shape.

The point was also to have a labyrinthine navigation through the zones ; we wanted the player to have several incentives to choose one zone or the other to continue their progression, as they will ultimately have to make choices in what zones they clear. While obviously taking part in the layout and blocking steps, I also designed the navigation on a larger scale, to make sure the player wouldn't feel lost or stuck at any point while progressing through the different biomes. I also made sure our intentions were respected, for the level to provide a true exploration dynamic and a lasting feeling of discovery throughout the vertical slice.

To ease collaboration with the Level Art team, and to solve graphic optimization issues, we used level streaming in Unreal Engine to display zones one after the other, so that the whole map isn't always loaded. This decision made our workflow much more flexible, and although it was sometimes a challenge to understand the way it worked, ultimately we learnt a lot about this tool.