Main Menu
The story is told from the perspective of a narrator. As implied by the artstyle, the game is happening inside of a story book.

Baba Yaga in the Village
The humongous Baba Yaga is a recurrent character in Russian folklore. Never seen without her strange house atop a pair of chicken legs, she is usually out causing mischief. Incidentally, I was in charge of the level design for this area.

The Mountain Peak
I was in charge of the blocking for this area, though it has changed significantly since my first iterations. The Day/Dusk/Night aspect was a very late addition from a very motivated Lighting Artist.

The Accordion Bear
Also common in Russian folklore, the Accordion Bear assists Anya in her quest. Though it can't be seen in the picture, the bear plays both a a regular accordion and himself : his midsection contains an accordion! Not as gruesome as it sounds. A beloved character among the development team.

The Final Challenge
The final level has gone through many iterations during development. We wanted something more challenging to conclude the epic, but playtest taught us that the game was too short to allow significant difficult scaling.

Anya and the Heart
The game's many cutscenes are shown through stills such as this one. It drives home the story book aspect while remaining possible for a small team such as ours.

The project

Anya and the Magic Ink was a massive undertaking and our most ambitious project to date. It involved an entire class of 27 students, in addition to an audio crew from l’Université de Montréal! For 6 weeks, we innovated, programmed, modeled, and made silly noises in microphones before delivering a polished, if short, 3D platformer.

The game features a papercraft artstyle alongside a russian folklore thematic. It is delivered in the form of a child’s tale. Armed with a magic paintbrush and inkpot, Anya must paint life back into the world to thwart Baba Yaga’s evil plans.

My contribution

I’ve had the honor of working as Creative Director on the project. One of my first tasks was pitching the game anew, as we were basing ourselves on a project from the year before. In the end, we started from scratch, but kept the narrative focus, papercraft artstyle and 3D platforming. Painting the world was the main drive behind this new pitch. Following this, I’ve had to ensure the cohesion of everyone else’s work and maintain a rock-solid vision of the project as a whole. Routinely, the directors would meet and discuss current and expected issues, and we would debate the best course of action. Re-scoping, reiteration and planning were frequent but deftly handled, as development proceeded smoothly with few hurdles or panic moments.

Above all the technical skills we’ve learned at UQAT, what really shined during this project was our combined soft skills. Such a large project dropped on a ragtag bunch of amateurs requires iron discipline and saintly maturity to remain focused and productive. I believe we more than excelled in that regard.

Aside from my leadership duties, I also worked as a level designer during most of the project. I took care of the Village mostly on my own and set up the blocking for the final area of Level 2 (the Dusk level). The greatest challenge was building something attractive and believable with very few assets. I also had to keep in mind Anya’s very athletic capabilities in mind while constructing the basic geometry, and ensure out-of-bounds areas were not attractive exploration prospects.