Little Cosmos
Little Cosmos is a single-player, 3D-platformer where you explore different planets, each with their own unique environments and challenges. It was made in Unreal Engine 5 by a team of 9 people. It was the my third game project at Futuregames, and I acted as a level designer as well as sound designer. It was an incredibly helpful experience, challenging me in both level and sound design, introducing me to UE5 as well as Wwise which I used to implement sound into the game.
Finding Harmony
Finding Harmony is a concept I created for my Futuregames application. It was created during a period of my life in which my mind was all over the place. I was dealing with a lot of changes, loss and self-doubt. As a result, Finding Harmony is very much a game about coping and moving forward. The gameplay concept was based on my bachelor's dissertation, in which I delved into the relationship between musical notes and colours, and how they're connected.
In a nutshell, you move through various rooms choosing which way to go based on clues, music-based or colour-based. In every room you enter you are presented with two different coloured doors that, if you move close to them, play two different musical parts. If you move through the correct door, the next room will keep the colours you had already "unlocked", and add the colour of the door you just went through. Your start the game in a room with no colours at all, and end it with all the colours fully restored. Along with this, you also start the game with only a single violin playing, and end it with a full musical piece.
I wanted the player to think throughout the game that they are looking for some damsel-in-distress type character called Harmony that they have to rescue, but then the twist in the end being that they were themselves playing as the character Harmony all along. So the game was never about finding some other person, it was about finding the way back to yourself. Rather than the end room having pictures of my sister up on the wall to symbolise this, the finished game would have a mirror there instead, directing the player's attention back to themselves. The unsettling opening cutscene symbolises the character you're playing as being overwhelmed. The story of the game is about Harmony slowly building themselves up again, starting from scratch.
Sidenote, the name Finding Harmony has three meanings in this game. It means finding the character Harmony (yourself), finding harmony within yourself when everything feels wrong, as well as walking through the correct doors and finding musical and visual harmony.