After the success of my end of studies project at ISART Digital, I was approached by Fabloo Games, who wanted to help us create a commercial game on the basis of the student project. This is where the adventure of Sand Door Studio began, which led us to recruit more people, from inside and outside the alumnis of ISART Digital. And eventually meet up with Quantic Dream at the GDC, who were looking for games for their new editing label: Quantic Spotlight. We began working together from here, developing the universe of the game, and expanding the scope of what we could do to increase its quality.
​
In this game, you play as Imë, and your Kingdom’s fate relies on you… you… and you! Rewind time to create clones of your past-selves, called Remnants, and fight with an army of yourself.
Become legion and triumph over hordes of monsters to rescue Antala!
My role during this production concerned those topics:
​
Creative Lead:
As this project Game's Director, I was responsible of the direction the team was going in. With help from the Art Lead, and Dev Lead, my job was to make sure everyone knew where to go, and to communicate that properly to everyone. I also handled transmission of feedback from consultants to the relevant team members.
​
Game Design:
As Lead Game Designer on this project, I took the responsibility of doing the starting Game Design Document, and the spreadsheets that were used for the making of the game.
I designed the character's attacks and the weapon system, the choice of it having as little friction as possible is one of the main directing factors of the whole system, and game.
With the help from the other Game Designers, I designed some of the skills available to the player, and the enemies.
​
System Design:
The main feature of the game, the Remnants, was a really hard feature to design. Thankfully, the student project was there to show us that we were going in the right direction. There are never enough ways to "play" with such a main feature, in a game that revolves around something specific like this, and there are also countless ways of breaking everything. Playing around those issues, while giving the best possible feeling to it, and to all other features and systems, was a focus for the whole project.
Combat Design & Boss Design:
I designed the enemies of the game, with input from the design team. Their behaviors, attacks, values, and subsequent variants. A main concern was how they played with the player, what they would force them to do in order to deal with them properly, and what priority they should all have for a player trying to clear a level, what combinations of powers should be possible, how they interact...
My favorite part was designing some of the boss fights, namely the second Boss, Abomination. I designed it all from paper timelines all the way through to implementation, and playtesting. I asked the programmers to make it as easy to balance as possible, giving us as much levers as possible to tweak values, timings, hitboxes...
Thanks to the great work of the Art Team, this boss is one of my proudest achievements in the game, I really love how it turned out.
​
Level Design:
The level design of the game was made in tandem with our Level Designer and external help. I was mostly handling Act1 and Act3.
Just like the student project, the main drive of the level design is to always give many routing options. The core challenge of the game is routing, strategizing how the player wants to deal with the obstacles we put before them, and how best to master them on replays.