Odette's Last Waltz

Role: Level Designer,

Game Designer

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Team Size: 10

Development Time: 8 Days

Platforms: PC

Fight waves of automatons as you dance through the night.

Beat each stage and defeat the boss to win.

Responsibilities

Level/Game Designer:

Drafted all room layouts and implemented the set dressing for each room.
Collaborated and designed the flow of the map and jam limitation implementation with the spinning attack and rerolling attack augments.
Created and implemented all menus and their functionality.

Design Process:

With the game being a rogue-lite, the process of designing the room's block-outs came down to figuring out the size of the room and making different set pieces for each ring of the room.
From there, the pieces were used in different orientations to make similar rooms but with enough variation to recognize it's unique.
The blue lines here show the walls/low cover where the player can't move through and how there is the center piece and its flipped variants.
While this blue lined block-out and its variants make up roughly half of the 30 rooms, there are some more unique layouts such as the red and green one seen here.
With the set dressing, I used an asset pack to make the different pieces of cover that would fit a stage-play and aligned them with the blockouts.

Map2-Marked

Map2

Map6

Map2-Marked

1/8

Map3

Screenshot 2026-07-09 124507

Screenshot 2026-07-09 124445

Map3

1/4

Waltz1

Waltz2

Waltz4

Waltz1

1/4

What Went Well

Programmers did an excellent job of creating both the necessary mechanics for a rogue-lite and implementing the jam limitations we wanted to add as mechanics.
Art direction came together well and the models both created and used from the store were top notch.
Level design was believable and high quality in appearance. The destructible objects and traps also help bring more variation to more open layouts.

What Went Wrong

There was some confusion on how to transition between stages while fitting a narrative and theme that would make sense to the players, eventually though we locked in on just teleporting the player in-between the curtain animation after each stage.
Some more time could've been used on the lighting and upgrade screen polish. Some more advanced visuals for the ability reroll were planned but ultimately cut for time.
Our source control did not like using World Partition and it would slow down the upload/download process significantly.

What I Learned

Having multiple programmers helped with getting content both into engine and playable.
Having specific roles/areas of focus for all team-members also helped produce a lot of content for such a short span of time.
World Partition (when using UE) is fine, but a more robust source control should be used that can handle all that data.