Cinematic environments built and shot in Unreal Engine 5, and small, finished games made in Unity, all by one person.
Each one is built, lit, and shot as a short film in Unreal Engine 5, from the layout and set dressing to the lighting, camera work and grade.
5:31 · 4K
A castaway's island of limestone cliffs, scrub and clear shallow water, made for the music video Melodies of Time. The hard part was the water: reading as turquoise over sand, dark over rock, and clear enough to see the stones on the bottom of the cove.
4K cinematic
A cinematic set to a cover of Gorillaz' On Melancholy Hill. A man runs through wind-blown grassland, past a tin-roofed cabin and down an empty road towards the mountains. The whole piece rests on the grass: it moves in every shot, and it has to read from both a drone's height and the runner's ankles.
Part 1 · 1:50
One derelict industrial alley shot twice. Scaffolding, steel walkways, oil drums, hanging cable and neon signs. Part 1 is night: smoke, sparks and a warm grain like old film. Part 2 is the same alley in cold daylight, with every surface on show.
Part 1 on YouTube ↗ Part 2 on YouTube ↗
Every environment goes through the same four passes, and the camera comes first. Nothing is built that the lens won't see.
Grey shapes and a camera. The shots decide the layout, and the layout decides what gets built.
Rock, foliage, props and decals, added until the set holds up at the distance the lens sees it from.
Sun, sky, fog and practical lights. This is the pass that makes a place feel like a time of day.
Camera moves in Sequencer, rendered at 4K, then graded and cut to music.
Every place starts
with a shot.
Small games, finished and released, plus the one on the bench now. Design, code, art, sound and trailers are all done in-house, and every released game is playable on itch.io.
A coastline at the bottom of your screen.
A strip of beach sits under your other windows while you work. The tide runs on a real clock and leaves things on the sand: shells, sea glass, bottles, bone. Clean them, identify them, and fill a cabinet. A pet you design dives for more. Leave a spare find out and an animal comes for it.
No streaks, no daily rewards, nothing that punishes you for closing it. It is a calm game in a genre built on making you come back.
Don't let him go home.
Udin works the overnight desk at a lost property office. You are not Udin. You can only send him to things: the phone, the fuse box, the hatch, the back door. Everything you send him to do frightens him, and his nerve only comes back while he sits at his desk doing nothing.
Two or three things want him at once, and the far corner really is far. The game is choosing what to let go.
A jar fills with rain. Spend it to make it rain faster.
The first game, made to learn the whole pipeline end to end: a number that grows on a timer, upgrades driven by data, saving, progress while the game is closed, and prestige. Evaporate the barrel for clouds and spend them in a cloud shop that changes what is possible, not only how fast it goes.
Raise one partner. It becomes what you made it.
Raise a single creature, called a Wild, on an island where the data shows through the grass. Feed it, train it, praise it or scold it, then command it in side-on battles. How you raise it decides what it grows into, across a branching tree of seven forms.
Inspired by the raise-one-partner games of the late nineties, without the part where your creature dies.
Game-ready set dressing made in Blender, textured and exported for Unreal Engine 5: the small things that make a scene look lived in.
DesignD Studio makes places to look at in Unreal Engine, and games to sit in with Unity.
The Unreal work is environments made to be filmed: laid out for the camera, dressed, lit, shot in Sequencer and cut to music. Each one is a short film, not a turntable.
The games are small on purpose. Each one is finished and released, and each is as calm or as tense as it set out to be: a beach that lives at the bottom of your screen, a night shift you have to keep someone through, a jar that fills with rain.
Everything is made in one studio, from the models and the levels to the code, sound, edits and trailers.
Free assetA game-ready timber cabin for Unreal Engine 5, given away free. The showcase is on YouTube.
Watch the showcase ↗