Project Babel

Project Babel was the most ambitious thing I have attempted — a two-person 3D adventure in Unreal Engine 4 with Fabien Guillaume, built remotely from 2016 to 2019. We restarted more than once as we levelled up, shipped a playable vertical slice and a teaser trailer, then shelved the full game. It never released. It was still my end-to-end education in game development.

The pitch

A lone wanderer crosses a frozen world of ruins and silence — no dialogue, no hand-holding. Environmental puzzles block the path: rooms that shift layout, labyrinths that punish assumptions, spaces meant to feel oppressive and beautiful at once. The goal is the Tower of Babel at the heart of it all, where the secret to restoring life on the planet waits at the top.

Two people, every hat

Fabien and I split everything — concept, blockouts, 3D models, materials, textures, rigging, level design, lighting, and Blueprint gameplay. Remote collaboration worked fine for logic and blueprints; syncing multi-gigabyte art files across time zones did not. That pipeline friction was as much a lesson as the game design.

What we built

We completed a third-person vertical slice, a teaser trailer and a collection of environment art and gameplay systems. The slice brought the frozen setting and shifting puzzle rooms together in a playable form.

• Third-person traversal through frozen ruins and puzzle-dense interiors — mood over open-world sprawl.
• Shifting rooms and labyrinths — disorientation as a deliberate mechanic.
• Concept art made physical — sketches and paintings turned into in-engine geometry, materials, and light.
• Blueprint gameplay — interaction triggers, puzzle logic, and prototyping without a dedicated programmer.

Stack

Unreal Engine 4 and Blueprints for gameplay. Blender and ZBrush for modelling, Substance Painter for textures, SpeedTree for frozen exteriors. Grey-box blockouts before polish — especially for puzzle rooms and labyrinth flow.

Why we stopped

The open-world scope exceeded what our two-person remote team could sustain. Each new area added assets to build and maintain, while restarts and large file transfers slowed progress. We stopped development in mid-2019.

If I started again tomorrow, the open world goes first. A tight labyrinth adventure with shifting rooms and one clear goal — reach the top of Babel — would have been the right scope. We proved the atmosphere and the craft; we never proved the product at open-world scale.

What Babel taught me

Babel taught me the full 3D production process, Blueprint prototyping and the importance of matching scope to the team. I would now test a smaller playable loop before committing to a larger world.

The teaser trailer is mood and scale — the Tower on the horizon. The embed on this page is the same clip; the carousel shows in-engine work: frozen exteriors, shifting interiors, concept art in Unreal.

Game dev is still in the picture. Project Huldra is the next chapter — solo UE5 forest horror with the scope lessons Babel taught the expensive way.