La Charente à L'Houmeau VR

La Charente à l'Houmeau VR is an interactive experience realized during my end of studies internship at ebim studio, from March to June 2021 in a team of 7 people.

It's a 4 months project in which I participated from the ideation phase to the end during the first part of my internship. I was the Main Game & Level Designer of the project, where I was able to make various proposals and exchange with the whole team to obtain a coherent and satisfactory result.

It is a virtual reality tour of Angoulême from the Houmeau district, on a boat. This project is a commission for the Musée d'Angoulême which holds the eponymous painting, painted by Gaston Boucart in 1927.

I worked on this project as a Game Designer (controls, interaction, documentation), and as a Level Designer (flowcharts, maps, grayboxing, level art). I also dealt with usability issues (UI/UX, playtests).

The map above is the user's progress along the Charente River in Angoulême. A narration is told by a character in the boat, giving anecdotes about various elements of the city.

In addition, the player can choose to target additional elements (in blue on the map) if desired by aiming with his eyes (and thus the orientation of the camera from the VR headset).

The Gameplay Structure View above details the flow of interaction with the player throughout the experience.

Then I was in charge of the Level Design. I worked on the pre-existing scene on Unreal Engine 4, where we got the satellite data of Angoulême to obtain a grayboxing base to work on. One of the things we had to do was to adapt the city to the era we were presenting it in, which was 1927.

By studying several maps from different periods, as well as analyses of the urban plan formulated by architectural and urban planning agencies for the city, I was able to remove the buildings that did not yet exist at the time.

However, we had to fill in the gaps that were created, and there are very few sources on the precise buildings of the 1920s in Angoulême, so we decided to take liberties with some of the less important spaces that would not be seen too closely by the player, in order to keep an overall consistency.

Here is the global result seen from above. Since our game has to run on Oculus Quest 2, strong optimization issues arose from the beginning of the production. For this we used generic low-poly buildings to fill the panorama from the player's boat. Only certain buildings characteristic of the city skyline were reproduced to convey the idea of Angouleme despite the constraints and the difference in time.

And here is the result with the user's point of view, between each main narration, skylights appear with markers to help the user to aim at the point of interest of his choice, with the magnifying glass reticle.