Role : Game design, code, art Duration : 2 weeks, for the Gamedev.js Jam 2025 Engine : Godot 4
Skills : • Puzzle/Level design • Narrative design • An atypical 3Cs implementation to bring a new perspective to chess
BURDEN is a puzzle game inspired by chess. Within a dark atmosphere, you are the last spawn standing against the Chained Queen. Will you be able to defeat her ?
• Play chess from a pawn perspective. Unable to see the whole board, players have to be cautious. • Contols are « planified turn-based ». With the help of a timeline, players are able to planify up to 5 moves ahead. Design-side, I combined it with a turn limit per level, forcing players to take a moment to think further than one move at a time. Therefore, they have too take risks sometimes. • I took a great attention to the game atmosphere, I wanted something strange and dark. Chained Queens talks are voluntarily enigmatic.
Role : Technical Game Designer Duration : 1 month, for the Boss Rush Jam 2025 Engine : Unreal 5 – Blueprint
Skills : • Boss design • Prototype the character controller and boss ideas in blueprint • Manage a multi-disciplinary team of 4 people
Alya is a third person 3D game where players can use a magic helix wand to fly and fight in a desert full of illusions.
• The main challenge was the character controller. Alya has a generous move set. She’s able to jump, attack, shield and dive to explore and fight. I paid attention to code something functionnal but also as smooth as possible in a single month. • Bosses are designed to « sublime » the character controller. Each of them aims to challenge a part of Alya’s move set with a singular gimmick.
Role : Game design Duration : ~1 week Engine : Unity
Missions : • VR (Meta Quest 2) • Research on sign and feedbacks • Balancing
Space Invader VR is a school project where we had to recreate Space Invader, juicier and in VR. We (team of 6) focused our work on VFX to create a visually appealling experience. I wanted the player to feel very powerful, so everything explodes and players are able to fill a rage bar that allows them to release a powerful attack.
Intentions document (final result may vary from it) :
Role : Graphism, design, code Duration : 96H for the GMTK Jam 2024 Engine : Godot 4 Final placement : Top 15 % (1180 / 7640)
Skills : • Design a new take on a video game classic • Polish it has much as possible with cools features • Pace 20 levels with unique ingredients
The One Who Crawls is a snake-inspired game with a dark atmosphere.
It adds two twists to the original game : • The « snake » is replaced by an Ancient God that is controlled by the mouse cursor, bringing more « round » movement. • « Fruits » are replaced by souls that makes the Ancient God level up. It adds one part to its body and players have to chose which part they want to add between two. Each part adds its own effect to the game!
The following work was made for my level design classes during my Master degree in Game Design at I.I.M., Paris, France, under the supervision of Hugo Duron, level designer on Hunt : Showdown.
I was challenged to design in 1 week an open world into the FIFA license (or as it is called now, EA SPORTS FC) and to do the blocking of a zone of the said open world. The simulation aspect and the take that EA has on football (or soccer….) in general made me unable to propose an eccentric gameplay. I therefore chose to provide an experience integrating open world mechanics into FIFA career mode. The result turns out to be much more hub-ish than expected. But it offers another approach to this roleplay mode by offering players something other than a menu to facilitate identification with their character.
I chose to create a city called La Ciudad, a city that revolves around football. I did the blocking of its downtown in Unreal Engine 5 :
Quick proof of concept – Some designed features are, of course, missing or unpolished
EXPERIENCE DESIGN – A QUICK SUMMARY
Navigation
It was important to me to provide an interesting gaming experience where players weren’t just walking, but still « playing football » in some way. Offering a pass system allowing players to temporarily boost their speed, coupled with a scoring system by shooting at urban goals, turns La Ciudad is a real fun exploration experience!
Life in the city – Quests and events
To accentuate the feeling of belonging to a world, I offer players a city in which they can meet other FIFA players but also where many NPCs wander around. They will be able to pass them balls, chat with their fans, or avoid the haters who will try to tackle them to steal their balls! In addition, real players from their team will walk the streets of La Ciudad, in order to create a coherent and living world.
All of these people will be able to take players on side quests and challenges related to football. In addition, many random events linked to daily life will twist the player’s navigation in a semi-random manner between each match. This will create a feeling of renewal as well as anchoring in the reality of La Ciudad.
Hymn of Winter is game where the player inbodies a shaman whom the snow threatens to bury. He has to soothe the heart of the gods by beating his drum rhythmically!
Hymn of Winter is a rythm game made during a jam. Every team had a console and a theme to follow. Our team had to design a DS-type game with « drum » as a theme.
Credits : Design: Clément NOWACKI – Arthur CABLÉ – Luana TRAN NGUYEN Programmation: Arthur PEJOIANE – Hugo PETIT–VILLARD – Yoann CHEVANCE Art: Mattheo BOIZET – Tanguy LECERF
Role : Game Designer Duration : 6 months (on-going) For : Annoying Frog Studio (~20 people) Itch.io link : Click here
Missions : • Proposal of fun game mechanics while transmitting a powerful ecological message: The player explores a desolate planet and uses magical pollen to restore life by growing grass. • Promotion of the importance of ecological gestures with recognition of the difficulty they entail. • Supervised two other designers and used Unreal Engine 5 to facilitate asset integration and improve team efficiency. • Dedication to creating a viable and achievable project, while providing a unique experience for players.
Star Gardener is a poetic single-player exploration game where your goal is to collect the last traces of existing pollen in order to revitalize it and make it bloom again. By spreading this pollen thoughtfully, you can move forward in this lost world and learn more about the journey ahead.
DOCUMENTATION
Here are some examples of documentation I made during the production of the Star Gardener. The presentation below was made to convey a clear idea of what we (game designers) wanted to bring to the character and its ability to move and explore the world in a unique way. In the early drafts, we tried something close to Death Stranding controller but due to time and technical restrictions, we were obligated to design a more simple controller.
I also made some shorter document like the UI one to go directly to the essential. They were here to indicate the global idea of a concept to our programmers and artists what we needed at the time.
This level was made for my level design classes during my Master degree in Game Design at I.I.M., Paris, France, under the supervision of Laura Mas Maury, level designer on A Plague Tale.
The order was to built in Unreal Engine 5 a level that could fit in A Plague Tale : Innocence in 1 week. I had several constraint : the level must take place in an abbey and its surroundings, and the story mission brief had guidelines I had to follow as well. For example, the level had to start with a stealth phase and end with an escape phase towards the forest.
LEVEL
Here is the result. Plans, user story and design intentions are detailled below videos:
The level I built and a proposition of mission that could fit it.
A general tour of the level building.
PLANS
The general idea of the level is to offer a circulatory environment where players really feel like they are infiltrating a community removed from the world. It was important to start them a little far from everything to force them to walk, then to pass through the restricted areas that are the common areas of the abbey to feel that they are breaking in and that their presence is an intrusion .
General plan of the level
Once in the abbey, players will arrive in the courtyard. This more open space will reinforce the feeling of exploration and danger when they have to find a way to distract the monks and later flee the building after stealing the relic.
Close up and detailled view of the abbey itselfLegend of previous plans
USER STORY
The user story is a document of intentions of what we want to tell in the level and a list of all the places the player will pass and what he will do there.
👔 inTIErrupted is a 2 player co-op game made during an alternative controler class. The players main goal is to untie completly a 10 feet (3 meters) long tie without being caught.
I was mainly in charge of the level design and balancing. Due to our schedules, I also ended up being in charge of the code in C# with Unity to finish the game in the following months, since inTIErrupted was selected for the GDC 2023 for the ALT.CTRL exhibit!
I had the opportunity to work on this level during my level design classes during my Master degree in Game Design at I.I.M., Paris, France, under the supervision of Laura Mas Maury, level designer on A Plague Tale.
The level was built in the Far Cry 5 map editor (used for Far Cry Arcade) from Ubisoft in 1 week. I wanted to play with the zombie pack and bring an « horror » vibe to my level. It’s a « Journey » map, the main goal for the player is to reach the exit.
Here is the result. Design intentions and solutions are detailled below the video:
STORY – BACKGROUND OF THE MAP
You incarnate the only survivor of a plane crash after you and your friends were flying during a violent storm, somewhere in the eastern Himalayas. You wake up in the middle of the debris, on top of a mountain on which there is a mysterious temple.
INTENTIONS
I used to play a lot of Far Cry 4 and I was very fan of the Shangri-La phases . They are basically long corridors with a lot of zombie-ish ennemies in an south-east asian themed environment. I wanted to replicate a little bit of that with a thin layer of an horror atmosphere. It translates into various way in my level.
NAVIGATION
The level is divided in 3 parts.
1. The Beginning
The beginning of the level is a very straight foward ‘corridor’ that shrink to the point that the player have to crounch to continue it to the end of the section. It act as a funnel where the player can’t be lost and that isn’t very dangerous, since zombies always comes in front of the player. They are a lot but they never take the player by surprise, making them pretty easy to kill. At the end, the whole start of the level act as a tutorial for the player to familiarize themselves with the feeling of their shotgun.
2. The Village
The second part of the level is a more open one. A single path is drawn on the ground, in the dirt, but the player is allowed to take the path they want. In example, the player is not forced to directly walk into the villlage, but they can walk around in the forest nearby for a sneakiest approach. This part comes in contrast with the previous one, to make the player feel that the world they are into is bigger than they thought, but, since every house is in flames, the danger too.
3. The End
All roads leads to the same end, which are two arenas: the bastion and the fort. Everything is more or less closed around the player, and their only chance to survive is to kill every ennemy without dying first. It creates a focus on this last tension points after a relative freedom in the village.
WORKSHOPS
To create variety and keep the player, I created two workshops:
1. Breakable ground
The player has to shoot the ground at the start of the level, in the temple. I think it creates a cool moment and a certain « Whoah » effect since I had to create it entirely in the engine using test surfaces!
2. Quad
This workshop is a shot of power before the last section of the level. Shooting zombies in the head is fun, but rolling on them with a quad is funnier! It may feel a bit out of place considering the whole level, but it give the player a very interesting reward after several minutes of fights against zombies and a cool incentive to continue to play.
COLORIMETRY
The colorimetry is all dark and white with a huge satured red. The only elements that stand out are linked to violence : blood, fuel barrel that can explode, explosion themselves, fire, zombies etc.
The red color oppresses the player during their journey.
SHOTGUN
I chose on purpose to give the player a single firearm, a very specific shotgun that can only fire two bullets before reloading. There is no other gun, the player has to stick with it. I never wanted a very hard level, so I was pretty generous with the munitions. The player has a lot of room to miss their shots on several zombies without being too punished. Nontheless, the shotgun magazine being limited, it forces the player to reload after almost every shot, making them vulnerable to a potential ennemy assault.
It helps to maintain this layer of pressure on the top of the head of the player that keep them entertained, despite being a killing machine that can one shot almost every zombie.
Clément NOWACKI 