Caravan Sandwitch

I work as a level designer on the Caravan Sandwitch project. I joined the Plane Toast team at the beginning of 2022 and we worked together until the end of my studies. After that, I continued to work full-time with Plane Toast to help design and produce the world of Caravan Sandwitch.
It was a very rewarding and energetic first experience.

Year: 2024 | Genre: 3rd-person Narrative exploration | Platform: PC, PS5, Switch

Caravan Sandwitch is small open world, 3rdPerson Adventure/Exploration game. It was produced using Unreal Engine 5. In Caravan, you play the role of a young teenager who travels around a post-apo Provence in her van. The game is a blend of exploration, puzzle, narrative and mystery.

Team size : 15

Tools Utilized :

Unreal Engine 5
blender
Figma
Notion
Git

Production timeline :

[2 years & 7 months]

2 mouth of pre-production
18 mouth of development
10 moth of polish

Play demo here

MY PROCESS

Preproduction

Reading intentions
Sketch and paper design
World design documentation
Digitals layouts

Production

World blocking
Level blocking
Test & iteration

Polish & dressing

Level dressing

Reading intentions

At the very beginning, I began by reading the team's intentions for the game. Before even starting to produce anything, I wanted to understand the dna that the game's creators wanted to instill into the world of Caravan Sandwitch. I was lucky enough to have 3D visuals produced by Emi Lefèvre to inspire me and start proposing ideas.

I was able to start gathering reference images on which to base design ideas, and start thinking about what the world of Caravan Sandwitch might look like.

The idea was clear: create a post apo universe inspired by the French region of Provence.

World design documentation

In order to design the world of cigalo, I created a level and world design bible to which I referred in order to produce our mini open world. It's a very meticulous process, because every little change in gameplay or in the way spaces are conceived can induce changes that impact the whole design of cigalo.

Sketch & paper design

We define the size of our world, to predefine the player's path with flowcharts and sketches, and once that was done I defined it in more detail by creating 2D maps that allowed us both to design the spaces and help the team visualize the cigalo world.

Digitals layouts

I used a method similar to that used to produce the large maps for world of warcraft.

Create identifiable regions with easy-to-recognize biomes that make it easy to know what zone you're in without needing to consult the map.

Then it's a matter of going into more detail for the important areas like the village, where most of the narrative takes place. Each space needs to be designed according to its function. The village, for example, is very aesthetically pleasing, but has few gameplay elements. The intention is to let the player know that this is a quiet area where you can take your time chatting with the npgs.

World blocking

When I was designing the world of Caravan Sandwitch, I had to do some pretty brutal blocking. It was essential to do this in order to define the size of our open world, to realize the distances between the various points of interest and to start mapping out the narrative path.

Level blocking

Having defined in detail everything we needed to produce the world of Caravan Sandwitch, we began the blocking phase. Based on the documentation, we were able to create blocking to test navigation and implement the narrative.

Test & iteration

For example, here we have the starting zone for the game: "les calanques". The blocking phase enabled us to realize many things we hadn't anticipated during the pre-production phase.

This necessitated several iterations and a lot of testing to obtain an area that was both dense and interesting to explore.

Our wish has always been to let the player discover the world of Caravan Sandwitch without being held by the hand or bombarded with hud.

What we wanted was to reward exploration, and for every little path to lead to something, without it necessarily being important.

Small discoveries are sometimes the ones you remember best. Some paths lead to large ruins that can be explored and filled with materials to be recovered. Other paths lead simply to a small element of cigalo's history.

Level dressing

My final task in producing the world of caravan sandwitch was to replace the main elements and work with the artists to finalize and produce a version close to the final result. At this point in the production process, we were playing a sort of ping pong with the artists to refine and make the blocking beautiful and aesthetic, while retaining the design intentions I'd set out to achieve.