RiftFall - The Corupted War

Top-down action game – 48h Game Jam – WonderJam UQAC (2024)

My Design Roles

  • Game Designer
  • Combat Designer
  • Level Designer
  • Sound Designer
  • Narrative Framing
  • Asset Remixing

RiftFall - The Corupted War

The Game in 48 Hours

RiftFall is a fast-paced, top-down action game built from scratch in 48 hours. The player navigates a war-torn arena, dashing and striking through waves of enemies. The core pillars: immediate feedback, fast movement, and reactive enemy pacing.
Developed on a custom engine built by my teammate, the game was designed and built with no visual editor, no prefab system, and no physics or collision preview.

My Design Roles

I led the design and integration of multiple systems:

  • Combat Designer: Defined the player’s dash-attack loop, its timing windows, and basic feel
  • Level Designer: Created the entire playable space using LDtk, with no direct link to the engine
  • Sound Designer: Selected, trimmed, and layered SFX for actions, hits, ambience and transitions
  • Narrative Framing: Gave structure to the world, factions and corrupted conflict theme
  • Asset Remixing: Composed the whole level from a single composite sprite sheet with no separable tiles

Challenges

One of the game’s biggest constraints became my main creative challenge:
I had to build the entire level using one flat image—meaning no modular tiles, no object layers, and no collision preview. This forced me to pre-plan visual rhythm manually, embed gameplay cues into background shapes and design collision and movement purely from layout intuition.
Despite this, the map delivers strong readability, progressive flow, and moment-to-moment clarity.

Lessons Learned

Looking back, I would reverse the pipeline : I would select the visual assets before defining the universe or gameplay style.
In this jam, asset limitations dictated too many creative decisions. Next time, I’d make the tools and style serve the idea—not the other way around.