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Introduction

Carry Me is a wingsuit exploration inspired by Sky: Children of the light, created by team of four for TGC game jam in three weeks, with theme Generosity

Tools

Unreal engine 5, Maya, Diversion, Illustrator, Trello, Photoshop.

Game Design Process

My Work Summary:

Position: Lead Dev, Design and Technical art, Project Manager.

Led initial design ideation sessions and contributed to core creative direction.
Authored and maintained the full Game Design Document (GDD), ensuring alignment across disciplines.
Planned and facilitated task distribution while overseeing ongoing project management.
Managed version control pipelines and supported artists with asset integration and optimization.
Owned the complete technical implementation of the project, including gameplay systems, UI art and implementation, save/load functionality, audio integration, animation integration.
Directed level design, from blockout to final polish.
Developed and maintained technical art features such as particle effects, grass and wind shaders, cloud systems, and additional VFX.

FEATURES:

GLIDE THROUGH A LIVING WORLD
Harness the wind and glide freely across breathtaking landscapes. Whether carving through canyons or coasting over forests, your journey is shaped by movement and momentum.
BRING BACK SOUND AND COLOR
Reconnect lost elements of generosity, each one revives part of the world. As you restore them, the environment blossoms with new melodies, hues, and fragments of poetry.
A WORLD THAT SINGS WITH YOU
Every generous act contributes to a growing soundtrack and unfolding verse. The music and poem of the land evolve through your discoveries.
A STORY TOLD THROUGH EXPLORATION
No dialogue. No exposition. Just you, the wind, and a world waiting to breathe again. Discover ruins, echoing voices, and fading memories as you rekindle what was lost.
A MEDITATIVE FLIGHT
Play at your own pace, graceful and quiet, or daring and swift. Whether you chase speed or stillness, the wind carries only what you bring to it.

Gliding System

The gliding experience was built to feel both intuitive and expressive, giving players a sense of weight, momentum, and freedom as they traverse the world. Early prototypes explored how wind influence, body tilt, and speed modulation could work together to create a fluid movement language. From these tests, I developed a physics-driven system that responds dynamically to updrafts, wind tunnels, and open-air stretches, allowing players to carve, dive, and drift with precision. Camera behavior, too, became part of the sensation, subtle banking, delayed follow-through, and horizon stabilization combined to sell the feeling of flight without overwhelming players. Layer by layer, the systems were refined to emphasize meditative flow: minimal friction, graceful recovery, and a constant sense of forward motion that encourages exploration over competition.

Visual & Audio immersion

To support the game’s quiet narrative, audio and visual design were built as living systems that react to the player’s presence. Ambient soundscapes shift and bloom as lost melodies are restored, and both foliage and sky palettes evolve with each act of generosity. The adaptive soundtrack was designed to grow organically, new musical layers emerge in response to exploration milestones, blending seamlessly into existing motifs so the world feels as though it is singing with the player. Visually, the art direction leans into soft gradients, painterly textures, and atmospheric depth to create a dreamlike sense of place, reinforced by a UI that stays out of the way until it’s genuinely needed. The UX emphasizes clarity through subtle motion, restrained color use, and contextual surfacing, ensuring that every interaction feels connected to the world rather than imposed on top of it.

Learning Outcomes

Building this project reinforced the value of designing systems that feel meaningfully connected, mechanics, art, audio, and narrative all influencing one another to create a cohesive experience. I gained a deeper understanding of how early prototyping shapes final-feel systems, especially in movement design where subtle tuning has an outsized impact on player comfort. Working across both technical and artistic disciplines strengthened my ability to bridge communication between designers, artists, and engineers, ensuring that vision and implementation remained aligned. And first time working on complex soundtrack system really pushed me out of comfort zone and learn new tools and how to communicate with sound designers. Most importantly, the project underscored how powerful restraint can be: letting atmosphere, interaction, and world response carry the emotional weight instead of relying on explicit exposition.

Technical Details

Soundtrack

Carry Me has a progressive soundtrack system built from eight individual instrumental tracks. Each track is designed to work both as a solo piece and as part of a larger composition, created by amazing sound designer Henyx

The system starts with simple ambience and builds up dynamically. When the player reconnects an element of generosity, each tied to a unique musical instrument, the soundtrack reacts in two stages:

The newly unlocked instrument is isolated and smoothly faded in. It is then layered into the full composition, becoming a permanent part of the soundtrack.

To achieve precise audio syncing, smooth transitions, and the high-quality stereo sound that was important to us, I implemented this system using Meta Sounds. Each instrument has independent volume control, allowing me to single it out and blend it seamlessly.

For synchronization, I built a Soundtrack Manager in Blueprints that uses Quartz Clock to lock all audio to a consistent BPM. This ensured rhythmic alignment across all eight layers, enabling beat-perfect transitions and maintaining musical cohesion throughout the player’s journey.

Animation

The main mechanic of the game is gliding, so it was important to make it feel satisfying and truly sell the feeling of flight. A big part of that was the animation that was inspired by real footage of pro wingsuit skydivers and animation from Sky: Children of the light.

I built an Animation Blueprint with two state machines for walking and gliding. To make the gliding feel alive, I set up a blend space driven by the character's Roll and Pitch, so the animation responds directly to how the player moves. I also added a Transform Bone node on the root to exaggerate the dive and rise, so that I can have more control of it.

The character model and core animations were created by Thomas Elsenbrock.

State transitions are happening based on the Player Gameplay Tags

UI, Tutorial and Poems

The UI in Carry Me was very minimal. Its purpose was to cohesively deliver information to the player without being distracting. The game has no HUD in order to completely immerse the player and avoid rushing them with quest logs, etc.

I chose a monochrome white style with soft glows and gradients, utilizing vignette effects to bring more contrast to important areas. Since this was for a game jam, efficiency was key. For that reason, I only created two menu widgets: one for tutorials and poems, and one for the main and pause menu. I exposed their parameters so they could be edited from the blueprint that calls them.

At any given time, only two menus are created from the beginning. I then simply call them to appear and edit their content based on data tables—one for tutorials and one for poems. This approach is very performant and doesn’t clog the cache. I utilized Common UI and custom material instances.

Technical Art

Working on the technical art and trying to match TGC style was one of the best part on this project, I developed multiple customizable Niagara particle systems. These effects were designed to complement game’s visual language. These include environmental particles like wind trails and flying birds, as well as interactive systems such as melody points, each with a unique visual state reflecting the generosity element and a completed form. I also created dynamic connection trails between these points, character-based wind trails (with density controlled by movement speed), and specialized wind tunnel particles for both vertical and horizontal airflow.

Stylized landscape material, with automatic slope detection, grass placement, and texture fade based on distance, to avoid repetitive texture tiling and further reinforce stylized look.

Speed Lines post process material to enhance the speed feeling, with controllable speed, density and falloff parameters that change based on player speed.

On the rendering side, I implemented post-processing and material effects to achieve a cohesive, painterly look. This included a distance-based Kuwahara filter paired with a custom cel-shading post-process material, which together created a soft, illustrative quality. To bring the world to life, together with Nicolas Heredia we built a grass shader and a foliage shader, both featuring stylized wind simulation. A central technique was a global material function that controllably adjusts saturation across foliage and set-dressing elements, used visually to make the world grow more vibrant as the player reconnects melodies.
(Cloud shader is an asset from marketplace, that I modified to fit project needs)

As you can see an important point for us, was to create a windy atmosphere and enhance the gliding feeling, we tried everything we could to achieve it.

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