La Rana

La Rana is an adventure casual game where players explore the lost Rain Temple of Rana. Play as a small spirit frog who is the temple's last remaining caretaker. Traverse its grand chambers and winding passages to restore its former power and revive your fellow frog spirits along the way.

Quick Project Specs

  • Genre: adventure, casual
  • Made with Unreal Engine 4.19
  • Developed for PC (Windows)
  • Team size: 14
  • Development time: 5 months
  • Release date: December 2018
  • Published on Steam

Development Overview

In this project, I worked on a multidisciplinary team comprising of artists, programmers, designers, and producer. To develop this game, we worked using the SCRUM methodology and completed our game by delivering milestones to our stakeholder. These milestones were:

My Contributions

1) Design Base Metrics for Environment Design

I contributed in designing and establishing the base metrics for designing and building the environment based on the movement system that we had for the frog (protagonist character). To do so, I made a prototype level that showcased these measurements so that everyone in the team could have a reference to look back when designing levels and features.

Metrics showcase

2) Design and Build one of the Initial Side Chambers of the Temple

One of my contributions to the project was to design and build one of the initial side chambers of the temple (named “Act 0”). This is where the player is first introduced to one of the puzzle elements in the games: the sliding blocks that players squirt to make them slide along a predetermined path.

Design Goals

This section of the temple was designed with the following goals in mind:

  • To serve as an introductory scene to the sliding blocks
  • To implicitly teach the player how the sliding blocks work while still making a puzzle out of it
  • Maintain a temple-like architecture that was consistent with the game designer's vision of the game
Act 0 design diagram

3) Environment Decoration

Once we built the playable spaces of the temple, I assisted the artists in decorating some of the areas of the temple based on concept art and level paintovers made by the artists on the team.

4) Feature Implementation - Glowing Trail

One of my responsibilities of this project was to develop a feature we called the “glowing trail” feature, which is a feature made to show a visual connection between paired sliding blocks; whenever the player activated a paired block by squirting at either one of the paired blocks, a line linking the pair will glow sequentially from start to end. Once I implemented this feature, I made documentation available to the team to show how it worked and how to use it so that everyone in the team could understand how to use it and artist could take the feature to replace the placeholder assets with final assets.

5) Marketing Material - Trailer

During the later stages of development, I worked closely with the sound designer, to design and make the trailer for La Rana. My primary responsibilities were to capture all the cinematics and gameplay footages needed with Unreal Engine's camera sequences to compose the trailer and present my progress to the game designer, lead artist, and stakeholders. This trailer is currently being used to market the game on Steam