Wake Up is a calm, dreamy third-person puzzle game. You walk through an ordinary city and find flats hanging in the sky. Facades peel away like wallpaper, and streets bend up into walls. What you see decides what’s real.
We’re three people building it for the Epic AI MegaJam (November 12 to 15) in Unreal Engine 5.8: Seb on gameplay, puzzles and camera, Nat on art, world and light, and me (Laurent) on character, animation and presentation. We each run a handful of AI agents.
How you reshape the city
All four mechanics involve moving your body and handling the city around you, without casting spells. There’s no combat.
- Align. Step sideways until two broken pieces line up by eye and join into a bridge.
- Peel. Pull a facade’s loose corner and uncover another place, sometimes bigger than the space holding it.
- Stitch. Lace two street slabs together like a shoe, then haul the rope tight and cross.
- Fold. Fold a street into a wall, and gravity follows the bend and carries you along.
For the mechanics, our rule is author the result, simulate the feeling: we build the finished shape of each join, peeled sheet and rope pull by hand, then use code to give it weight, resistance and sound as you move it into place.
The art style
We explored four looks: overcast, golden haze, graphic painterly and blue hour. The one we’re going with keeps the dusk but lets a storm roll in. Low clouds sit on the rooftops, the streets are soaked and mirror every orange lamp, and almost everything is grey and blue, so the reds carry the frame: her scarf, the autumn leaves, the odd lamp.
In Unreal so far
Seb is tuning Align, where the join is judged from her eye height (160 cm) rather than the camera. I’m on motion matching, starting with a 110 cm/s slow walk without foot slide. Nat is making target frames for Home Streets before the city kit and wet Substrate materials. Our character went from a concept sheet to a rigged model in a day, and today she ran her first laps through a grey test level.
Full devlog with the reel and desk videos: Wake Up devlog 1: a city that stopped following the rules
itch.io page: Wake Up by lbernier
I’ll keep this thread updated with the next three devlogs: her animation, how we work with our agents, and the playable. The concept images are generated concept art.