Portfolio - Hugo Maerky

PORTFOLIO

Hugo Maerky Junior level designer

HUGO MAERKY JUNIOR LEVEL DESIGNER

hugo.maerky@yahoo.fr (+33) 6.52.68.40.28.

EDUCATION

Master’s degree in architecture, in 2022, Versailles, France

Level design master in ENSA-Versailles

Bachelor in 2016, in Pau, France

HOBBIES

Writting novels and RPGs Playing board games

SKILLS

WORK EXPERIENCE

Personal project Deimos-83 released in 2021 Game design, level design, 3D modelling

One-semester internship at Ark Rep studio in 2021 Game Design, Level Design, 3D modelling

Two-months contract at Ark Rep studio in 2022 Game Design, Level Design, 3D modelling

VR workshops «Moon Forest» and «Wiki Prairie School» with Walter Simone and Magali Paris in 2022 Game Design, Level Design

OTHER EXPERIENCE

Gamemaster in original role-playing scenarios

Fantasy, cyberpunk, realistic

PREVIOUS GAMES

DEIMOS-83

Deimos-83 is a game I created with two people during a semester in architecture school. Three key words directed its conception: vertigo, interior and weightlessness.

The player embodies Blume, an anxious geologist who finds herself trapped in an underground structure on an asteroid. The level design revolves around a gigantic well, which the player will cross several times in zero gravity. At each passage, he reveals new elements in the remains of a disappeared civilization and must interact with them to finally return to the surface. Alternating between puzzles and contemplation, the player experiences an architecture in weightlessness and discovers games of light and shadow along the way.

In Deimos-83, the stakes of the Level Design were to create environments that are transformed by the player’s action, and in which it is pleasant to return to discover, climb after climb, a more and more complete environmental narrative. The transformation in the level design is also parallel to the narrative evolution of the characters.

If you’re interested in testing it, Deimos-83 is available by following this link, for a game experience of about 1 hour, accessible to all: ensav.itch.io/deimos

On the left, a preliminary document used for the Level Design. On the right, the equivalent of the GDD of Deimos-83, with the different challenges and gameplays related to each climb, in each environment.

WIKI-PRAIRIE SCHOOL

Wiki-Prairie School is a VR game created for the Versailles Architecture Biennial by a group of fifteen people. It was presented in association with an exhibition of plants, and aimed at introducing the world of plants to players, mostly children.

I directed the Level Design, which consisted of assembling watercolor painted plants to form two virtual paths to walk through. The biggest challenge was to direct the assembly of meshes, textures and all the elements of the environment to form a fantasy landscap, clear enough not to lose the children. Changes of size and colors easily offered variation to allow the artistic team to represent about fifty species in a short time, without the environment being repetitive. The constraint of wireless VR headsets led to restrictions on the lighting ambiances, which were circumvented by a saturated graphic palette.

Finally, the treatment of the sky, the clouds and the sun, as well as the plants emerging from the roofs, aim to scale up the experience offered to the player, going from a courtyard to a small world.

POWERZ

Powerz is an educational game for children, on which I worked during an internship and then a contract in the Ark Rep studio, as a Level Designer. I entered the production when it was well underway, which allowed me to build different levels with a mix of existing assets and others that I modeled according to the needs of game design or narrative.

The first level is a hub allowing the player to go to different areas of the world. The challenge of the level design was to build a level in which the movement is fluid and interesting. Between stairs, slide, rope and jumping from branch to branch, the player can go through the level by noting his progress through the accumulation of souvenir-objects until he leaves for a new destination.

The second level is a farm that I had the mission to embellish and make more interactive. My approach was to incorporate a building system into the level, allowing the player to shape their environment and put to use an existing resource system built for other aspects of the game. A systematic approach to the wooden structures allowed for a multiplication of the number of models to give a graphic coherence to the whole level.

ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS

TWO CHINESE MEN

Architectural design often leads to questions similar to Level Design. The management of views and light, movements of bodies in space or the search for adequate materiality are key points in the design of architecture, which can be used in video games.

In this master’s project, I made a historical survey of the city of Marfa, Texas, using archive documents. Now recognized as an important city in the field of contemporary art, it was originally a small train station lost in the desert. Starting from the construction techniques of the time, and taking into consideration the interactions of views between the different buildings, it was possible for me to build little by little, through drawing, a credible environment, coherent with the time and the chosen landscape.

This work focused particularly on two Chinese men who lived in the small station, the first two inhabitants of Marfa. By looking at how they might live, I was able to go deeper into the survey. By following reflections on where they went, where they ate, slept etc. I was able to reinforce the coherence of the environment and design.

It is by following this kind of methods that I organized the level design of Deimos-83 with my team, taking into consideration the narrative interweaving of the different game spaces.

Here, the survey was made thanks to the equivalent of a white map, roughly modeled, then refined for some details like shadows or fabric folds, and finally cut to serve as a basis for the drawing.

NO-SLEEP CITY

The architectural project is intrinsically linked to the creation of new possible worlds, on the scale of a building, a district, a city... It constantly manipulates existing rules and creates new ones to offer a better environment to all.

In this six-people master’s project, our starting point was to create an environment in which humans are cut off from artificial lighting after sunset, leaving more room for animals during the night. Following the simple rule of no electricity, we agreed on how the urban environment would be transformed: return of fire, gathering around the fireplace, metamorphosis of urban furniture, wild animals walking on the sidewalks ...

To represent these transformations, we chose collages and photomontages in order to convey, in the manner of concept arts, the direction our scenario was taking. We used the tools of architecture, the blueprint, the section or the 3D model to explore the different scales of the transformed environment.

THE WHITE MOUTAIN

Architectural design often approaches a form of storytelling, in the sense that it seeks to bring different people together, in a multitude of moments, in order to create an optimal shared experience. When designing the place of an encounter, it becomes essential to think about the encounter itself and the people who would be part of it.

In my final year project, I designed several shelters punctuating a walk to a mining site where there is a gypsum mountain. In each of these shelters, I had to take into account how different walkers would interact with each other, depending on whether they knew each other or not, or the stage of the walk and the one of the day.

This set of refuges structures a progressive approach to the mining site, using the viewpoints to link different types of landscapes, industrial and natural. Each of these openings then forms a chapter of a long interrogation on our environment and its exploitation, to be observed alone or with others.

Here also, the working method corresponds to a 3D modeling of the shelters, then the refinement of their proportions and their details, before drawing them in 2D from cuts in the model.

PERSONAL WORK