Little Nightmares
Immerse yourself in Little Nightmares, a dark whimsical tale that will confront you with your childhood fears! Help Six escape The Maw- a vast, mysterious vessel inhabited by corrupted souls looking for their next meal.
As you progress on you journey, explore the most disturbing dollhouse offering a prison to escape from and a playground full of secrets to discover.
Reconnect with your inner child to unleash your imagination and find the way out!
At Tarsier:
Level Design intern from
2016-08-29 to 2017-04-7.
My contributions:
- Level design
- Tech implementations
- Level art
- Shaders
- Fixing bugs
Tools:
- Unreal Engine
- In-house tools
- Perforce
- Bonsai bug tracking tool
My time as an intern
After two years of studies as a Level Designer and creating eight games during my time at school I spend eight consecutive months at an internship which in my case is being spent on Tarsier Studios in Malmö, Sweden.
For that time I've been working on Little Nightmares that is created using Unreal Engine 4.
I worked in Unreal during my entire internship and now feel I am proficient in visual scripting and have gotten some experience with creating shaders as well.
My internship has been a great experience and a lot of fun. To work with people who have many years experience with game development has been great and I can't wait until I have that same experience and knowledge, I have certainly come a long way already but there is still so much more to learn.
Two of the biggest differences that I've experienced while working at Little Nightmares compared to the game projects in school is how much more time there is for polish
and how much more organized and thought through things are in production. At The Game Assembly we always had to push ourselves just to have a complete game with enough content to pass.
It has been great to be able to iterate more and get feedback from the other designers at regularly scheduled design meetings. To me this is where you truly become a better designer, getting feedback from your colleagues.
I've been working with both tech heavy and art heavy tasks and both have been really fun as I get to work
cross-disciplinary. Understanding how the other disciplines work and what's important to them makes me more efficient in my work as I can realize when something I do will be an issue for someone else on the team and fix it.
Design challenges
Designing in Little Nightmares has come with many challenges and things I've not had to keep in mind before. Things like a roaming AI, the stealth elements, designing in the "dollhouse perspective", etc.
An example of something I had problems with was accidently obscuring the players view of Six, the character that you play as.
I then had to do things like change the camera to work better with the design or make sure that the taller objects and climbables on are in the back of the scene.
It has also been interesting to work on a game where you play as a kid. You have to constantly keep in mind things like "Could a kid really pull something this heavy?" but also that kids are playful and want to interact with things and throw them about.
Something that has become somewhat of a pet peeve of mine is inconsistency in design language.
It also resulted in me being tasked with making sure that there's consistency in Little Nightmares as the goal has been for everything that looks interactable to be just that. Same goes for climb heights, levers, etc.
It's also been very enjoyable to work with stealth gameplay and making a game with both scary and more lighthearted moments in it.
It has been a great experience to work with Little Nightmares and something I'm very proud of having been a part of.
Screenshots
