Image 1 of 24
Project Babel was the most ambitious thing I have attempted — a two-person 3D adventure built in Unreal Engine 4 with Fabien Guillaume from 2016 to 2019. We worked remotely, restarted the project more than once as we levelled up, and eventually shipped a playable vertical slice and a teaser trailer before abandoning the full game. It never released — but it was my end-to-end education in game development.
A lone wanderer crosses a frozen world of ruins and silence. No dialogue, no hand-holding — just atmosphere, exploration, and consequence. Environmental puzzles block the path forward: rooms that change layout, labyrinths that punish assumptions, and spaces designed to feel oppressive and beautiful at once. The goal is the Tower of Babel at the heart of it all. At the top lies the secret that could restore life to the planet.
Fabien Guillaume and I split everything between us — concept, blockouts, 3D models, materials, textures, rigging, level design, lighting, and Blueprint gameplay. Working across time zones meant version control for logic and blueprints worked fine; syncing multi-gigabyte art files did not. That pipeline friction was as much a lesson as the game design itself.
We did not ship a full game. What exists is still tangible: a third-person vertical slice you could run through, a teaser trailer, and a large body of environment art and systems. The slice is where the design was most honest — less about world scale, more about what playing Babel actually felt like.
We did not build in a straight line. Babel was restarted from scratch more than once — each time because we had learned something new and wanted the game to reflect it. A lot of the calendar went to picking up tricks (better blockouts, cleaner materials, tighter Blueprints) and folding them back into the project. That learning was genuine; the cost was momentum.
The open world was the mistake — not the frozen setting, not the Tower, not the puzzles. Two people cannot sustainably own an open-world pipeline remotely. Every new area multiplied art debt; every restart reset progress; every large asset sync across continents ate time we did not have.
We stopped 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.
This is why an abandoned project sits on my portfolio: Babel was a full-stack game-dev bootcamp I ran on myself. The skills below are the hireable output — not the unreleased EXE.
The Babel teaser trailer is best treated as an appendix — mood, scale, and the Tower on the horizon. The project video on this page embeds the same clip. Screenshots in the carousel show the in-engine work: frozen exteriors, shifting interiors, and concept art brought into Unreal.
Babel did not ship. I am glad we built it anyway — and glad we stopped when the scope math stopped working. Every client project since inherits the same instinct: prove the loop, size the pipeline, then polish. Game dev is still in the picture too — Project Huldra is the next chapter, and that one is moving forward.