TAMARELLE-WEBER ALEXANDRE
Game designer / Level designer / Tech Designer
Last Pulse
3D Platformer-Puzzle
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Main Level Designer,
Tech Designer, UI designer,
Game Designer -
13 members (2 Game Designers)
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Finished
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October 2024 - July 2025
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Unreal Engine 5
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PC
Post-production
Help to established a vision
That was the first time I worked on a project where I created so many levels. I was the main Level Designer on the project, involved from the start in creating levels to help shape the vision of the game.
Build and rebuild
Too much liberty ?
I was almost totally free on the level design. But total liberty can be easily became a loss of bearing. For avoid this, I looked closely at all the project references, the ones used by the game designers, and also the ones used by the game artists.
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The game is set in a sci-fi industrial complex. While analysing the references, I found that containers often appear as environmental objects. They are interesting game elements because the player can jump over them, enter inside, and wall-run on them. So, I thought they would make a good theme for a level.
Logistics 17 from Josh Van Zuylen, reference for the game artists.
Titanfall 2 from Respawn Entertainement, reference for the game designers.
That not good enough
After the first game presentation, I had to face the hard reality that, even though the team liked it, the game had many problems that I needed to improve. But how?
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Once again, I decided to keep things simple. I gathered all the feedbacks. Like "the wall-run was fun but that wasn’t enough" or like "this part of the level design created too many bugs" and many others. For the good parts of the levels, I tried to remake them and push the ideas even further. When that wasn’t possible, I erased those parts and created new ones using my method of focusing on strong ideas, like I did with the containers.
Communication
Communication about Level Design
It was very difficult to communicate clearly about the level design with the art team. Most of the time, I realised too late that the information had been misunderstood.
To address this, I started creating draft document for each level and adding lots of notes and visual indicators directly in the blocking to guide the art team.
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Even with the documentation, it still wasn’t enough. So I tried to establish more direct communication with the art team. Before when I asked about the level design, I was satisfy by vague or hesitant responses.
As a result, I decided that for every micro-step in the production of the next level design, I would speak directly with an artist. Either face-to-face or over voice chat if we were remote. I would go point by point and ask whether anything posed a problem, and I made sure to really insist on getting clear feedback to avoid misinterpretation later on.
This method slowed down production significantly, but the upside was that misunderstandings about the blocking were drastically reduced, and I had to make far fewer changes to the level design later in the pipeline.
Before adding indications
After adding indications
Blocking Level:
Warehouse (Tutorial)
The level that benefited from this workflow was the last level produced, which also served as the tutorial. This level was the easiest to produce, thanks to the constant feedback that drastically reduced the scope and improved the understanding between artists and designers. It's frustrating that this level wasn't finished in time to be included in the final game.
Useful knowledge
In my previous project, I began to get accustomed to UE5, which was really useful because the programming team was mostly focused on developing the player character. As a result, I developed all the necessary tools for the level design myself. These tools from simple door to complex key systems, though they didn’t require advanced programming. I also used my knowledge of the engine to help the artists with sublevel management, widgets, and much more.
Organisation and Communication are the key
Last Pulse is about a robot who has to move through a post-apocalyptic world. On this project, I worked extensively on level design, and my skills as a tech designer in Unreal Engine 5 were very useful in supporting my team.