Overview / Usage

Made in just 22 weeks, Zoélie is an Action Puzzle Platformer that tells the story of a little girl, Zoélie, as she adventures in and around her hometown on a journey of growth and self-discovery. The game is a coming-of-age tale following the fantastical journey of a little girl confronting her life's changes through imagination. Zoé's overactive imagination is conveyed through a Quilt given to her by her older sister. This Quilt acts as a window into Zoé’s mind, which allows the player to see the world Zoé envisions around her. Imagination plays a key role in both the story and gameplay of Zoélie. More than half of Zoelie's production was created remotely during the pandemic in collaboration with students in game development, animation, visual effects, and sound design.

Note: The gameplay video provided is a highly condensed version of the full game. The full 30-minute playthrough can be found here

https://youtu.be/OvHYYlHutdU

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The Team:

Lead Gameplay Designer

Ben Brook

Lead Systems Designer

John Washington

Lead Narrative Designer

Phillip Corrado

Narrative Designer

Nathaniel J.L. Cartwright

Lead Programmers

Vincent Aliquo

Gabriel Tobias

Character Programmer

Kuan Xue

AI Programmer

Oscar Painvin

Lead Concept Artists

Julia Nguyen

Sammy Suen

Concept Artists

Sanda Gavriliuc

Brice Morgan

Holly Owens

Zach St. Amand

Lead Character Artist

Mackenzie Blackgoat

Character Artists

Michael Mauro

Taan Tuchinda

Anushay Qureshi

Lead Environment Artist

Nick Levene

Environment Artists

Rodney Burton

Dixon Dubow

Kellan Dwyer

Bernardo Gullo

Tyler Klimek

Mercedes Khumnark

Santiago Medrano

Stephanie Owens

Mike Relleva

Gianna Rockwell

Courtney Vogel

Amanda Wood

Lead Animation and Rigging

Tiffanni Blevins

Lead VFX Artist

Zachary Taylor

Technical Artists

Rachel Howard

Maxwell Mecimore

UX

Julia Myers

Megan Tkac

Sound Supervisor

Franco Tamasco

Sound Designers

Cal Eidson

Collin Peck

Voice Cast

Kelly Washington - Zoé/Sophia

Nathaniel J. L. Cartwright - Chonkers

Haden Ezekiel Felix - Patty

Phillip Corrado - Fernando

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Methodology / Approach

More than half of Zoélie's development was done remotely. Our campus was closed to due COVID-19, so all 44 students returned to their homes across multiple states and countries to continue development. We used the AGILE SCRUM system to organize ourselves into development teams.

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We divided our team into 4 categories:

• Core to handle coding and in-engine implementation of gameplay and technical assets.

• Integration to create art assets and implement them in-engine.

• Research and Development to spearhead art direction research and look development.

• Support was responsible for game design, overseeing the Agile process, and providing support to the other teams.

This allowed for collaboration across multiple disciplines while providing opportunities to work on more specialized tasks.

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In March 2020, almost the entire world entered into a lockdown due to COVID-19.

In a sense, we were lucky that the Zoélie project was already running on Perforce, and a discord server had been created to host most communications about the project. While we lost the convenience of face-to-face meetings, we could still work as a team across different national and international time zones. Scrum meetings were still held daily, and the whole team met at least twice a week.

Technologies Used

The game was created using Unreal Engine 4, Perforce, Visual Studio, Autodesk Maya, ZBrush, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, Substance Painter, and Substance Designer. We utilized Google services such as Drive, Sheets, and Slides, and held meetings and playtest/work sessions over Zoom and Discord. We also used computers outfitted with Intel CORE Processors and Intel Graphics Drivers which were instrumental in allowing us to finish our game remotely.

Other links

• Steam Page

Collaborators