Alazia is a stylized action-adventure game where players drain and redistribute vital energy from living creatures and plants to solve puzzles. Along the journey, they gather resources and craft tools to progress through a fractured yet vibrant world.
The game embraces the charm of cozy adventures but introduces a unique twist: the contrast between comfort and uneasiness. Exploration and creativity are rewarded, encouraging players to interact with the environment, devise clever solutions, and complete quests at their own pace.
Set in a relaxing and forgiving universe, Alazia still offers moments of tension through more challenging encounters. Its distinctive art direction brings to life a world that feels warm and inviting, yet capable of surprising the player with unexpected contrasts.
Introduction
As part of my graduation project at Haute École Albert Jacquard, I developed a range of gameplay systems for Alazia. My role focused on designing and implementing interactive, systemic mechanics, while ensuring technical robustness, clarity for the player, and flexibility for the design team. I worked on core features such as the Energy system, the Crucioles (creatures), the Miasme, and procedural Brambles, while also contributing to sound, VFX, animation integration, and the project’s trailer.
Crucioles & Spawner
Crucioles are small drainable creatures tied to the Energy system. They appear through a dedicated spawner, cycle through different states (idle, moving, fleeing, dying), and can be harvested for resources before respawning. Their behavior is driven by a state machine and optimized with pooling and batch updates to reduce CPU load. The spawner gives designers precise control over spawn zones and behaviors, making integration seamless and efficient.
Energy System
The Energy system is the backbone of Alazia’s gameplay. It defines a universal resource that the player can drain from or infuse into creatures, objects, and the environment. This mechanic provides systemic coherence and enables varied gameplay loops—from puzzles to exploration and navigation. Every entity has an energy component that determines its state (alive/dead, active/inactive), with direct ties to other features such as Crucioles, the Miasma, and Brambles.
Miasme
The Miasme is a toxic ground volume that continuously drains the player’s energy. It introduces spatial constraints, pushing the player to rely on light sources to dissipate it. Built as clusters of collision spheres, it is optimized through LOD management and distance-based activation. Its visual integration uses Niagara with custom HLSL modules to handle multiple light interactions, while the audio system dynamically adapts to the size and intensity of affected areas. Together, these systems give the Miasme a strong identity as both a threat and a worldbuilding element.
Procedural Brambles
I designed a procedural Bramble system directly in Unreal Engine to replace a rigid Blender-based pipeline. Using splines and Geometry Scripting, the system allows fine-tuned adjustments of shape, thickness, and direction, adapting naturally to the environment. Animation is handled in the shader via vertex offsets, improving performance compared to the original setup. This gave artists and level designers far greater flexibility, enabling the use of Brambles not just as obstacles, but also as tools for puzzles or even moving platforms.
Interactions, Altars & Vignettes
I built a contextual interaction system allowing players to act on diverse objects with a single input, ranging from item collection and dialogue to puzzle elements and energy mechanics. This system ties directly into Altars, where players can place items from their inventory to unlock progression events. Vignettes expand on this by combining dead environmental assets into small narrative clusters that can be revived with energy infusion—bringing vegetation, shaders, sounds, and particles back to life to strengthen the game’s restorative theme.
Quests & Puzzles
Quests and puzzles in Alazia are built semi-modularly, leveraging existing systems rather than relying on a heavy generic framework. Each quest combines interactive elements such as draining, infusion, collection, procedural Brambles, or Altars to create unique sequences. Progression is managed through Gameplay Tags and custom scripting, allowing flexible control over states, interactions, and event triggers.