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"Cardboard Chronicles" is a puzzle adventure game that is all about thinking inside the box. In a world made entirely of cardboard and doodles, you are the one who created it all. A child with nothing else to play with but some boxes and crayons gets spirited away into their imaginary world and becomes a doodle themselves! Smash and fling your way through puzzles as you help the strange characters you meet on the way to freeing yourself in Cardboard Chronicles!
For my graduate thesis project, our team of 13 developed a game for the Nintendo Switch over two semesters. As one of four artists, I took on the role of environment and prop artist, focusing on a visual style inspired by "Cardboard" and "Made by a kid" from our narrative. To achieve this, we kept the assets simple, with textures designed to look hand-crafted by a child. Before creating digital assets, we experimented by physically crafting with cardboard to better understand its layers, textures, and structural qualities.
Creating Materials and Assets:
I used Substance Designer to create cardboard materials and imported them into Unreal Engine, where I developed a master material with adjustable features like opacity, tiling, color depth, and tint to ensure visual consistency. I also created a separate master material for corrugated cardboard detailing on asset edges.
Since we were publishing on the Nintendo Switch, assets needed low polygon counts. For the town level, I created a modular building kit and a foliage package to maximize reusability. I also developed tileable textures for larger areas. Each asset was hand-painted in Substance Painter to achieve a childlike style, with the master cardboard material overlay adding texture variation.
Level Design:
The game featured five levels. I was involved in blocking out the layout of the town and to make sure we used environmetal cues to guide the player from one section to another without getting lost. There was a bell tower in the center of the town which was used as a 'weenie' and the player knew where they were at all times. We also made sure that this bell tower was shown as the players solved the puzzles to move through the game. My idea was to seperate each location into something that is easily readable but also makes the player want to explore a bit more even if there was a fixed path they could follow.
Initial whiteboxing was done by the design team and then I was to enhance them artistically using reusable kits and creating additional props as needed. I also prioritized optimization by reusing or reducing textures and components to ensure smooth gameplay.
Lighting, Optimization and others:
I handled lighting for all levels and final art optimizations. Most of the lighting was baked into the scene, and I applied post-processing to create a bright, colorful atmosphere.
I also created Steam page art assets, sprite sheet VFX, and the starting animation sequence using Unreal Engine’s Sequencer.
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