Wake Up is a calm, dreamy third-person puzzle game where 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 building it for the Epic AI MegaJam, November 12 to 15, in Unreal Engine 5.8. Seb handles gameplay, including puzzles and camera, while Nat does the art, world and light. I'm Laurent, and I handle character, animation and presentation. We each run a handful of AI agents. This is the first of four daily devlogs, starting with the game and how we arrived here.
- Gameplay and code (Seb): the mechanics, camera, game flow and underlying code.
- Character and animation (Laurent): her model and animation, plus screens, sound and music.
- Art and level art (Nat): target frames, the city kit, materials, lighting and dressing.
Seb is working on Align. The join is judged from her eye height, 160 cm, rather than the camera. I'm working on motion matching, starting with a 110 cm/s slow walk without foot slide. Nat is making target frames for Home Streets before tackling the city kit and wet Substrate materials.
Our first 26 seconds
This rough cut from day 0, the jam's first day, brings together the concept and four mechanics, along with our character's first steps on her own rig.
How you reshape the city
All four mechanics involve moving your body and handling the city around you, without casting spells.
Align
Align. You step sideways until two broken pieces line up by eye and join into a bridge.
Peel
Peel. Pull a facade's loose corner and uncover another place, sometimes bigger than the space holding it.
Stitch
Stitch. To cross a gap, you lace two street slabs together like a shoe, then haul the rope tight and cross.
Fold
Fold. When you fold a street into a wall, gravity follows the bend and carries you along.
The four mechanics in our new art style. Generated concept art.
Before we wrote any code, we drew each rule in three panels and turned those drawings into loops.
There's no combat in Wake Up. We checked what the brief meant by Hollow Knight, and fighting wasn't part of it. Inside and Journey gave us a starting point for the quiet mood, while Superliminal helped us think about spatial tricks.
Choosing the art style
We explored four looks for the city: overcast, golden haze, graphic painterly and blue hour. Blue hour won that first round, with wet streets, warm windows and a violet sky, and our first concept board was painted in it.
Overcast, golden haze, graphic painterly and blue hour. Generated concept art.
Our first concept board, in blue hour: Arrival, Two mechanics one solve, The folded city. Generated concept art.
The style 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 the frames read more like paintings than renders. Almost everything is grey and blue, so the reds carry the frame: her scarf, the autumn leaves, the odd lamp. Your eye goes straight to them. The impossible parts, like a peeled sky or a street curling into a wall, feel heavier and stranger in that light.
The underpass and her room, in the art style we're going with. Generated concept art.
Designing Home Streets in Sandscape
We worked through Concept Lock In in Sandscape, then the core loop: explore, observe, experiment, reshape, traverse, discover. That led to a full design document and a first playable spec for Home Streets at blue hour. We're keeping the scope there so we can make everything from the first logo to quitting feel finished.
In Sandscape, we worked on Concept Lock In alongside the character concept.
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.
Taking her into Unreal
The character went from a concept sheet to a rigged model in a day, and today she ran her first laps through a grey Unreal test level. I'll go through that process in devlog 2.
Four devlogs, one per day
- The puzzles take shape. This first post covers the game we're planning, its mechanics and our choice of look.
- Getting her moving. I'll follow her development from the concept sheet through to a rig running in Unreal.
- Working with our AI agents. Written briefs, models that check each other's work, and an AI producer that checks in every 30 minutes.
- Playing through the streets. We'll test the mechanics in engine, share what worked and what broke, and link to the playable.
The concept images are generated concept art; real captures date from November 12 and 13, 2026. We're entering the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam as the Sandscape team.