Where Cards Fall – Cinematic Design

Intro

Where Cards Fall is a puzzle game about building magical decks of cards to traverse through little meditative bits of a nameless protagonist’s life. As Cinematic Designer, it was my job to envision bite-sized, dialogue-less cutscenes based on a rough story outline and flesh it out by collaborating with animation, art, and programming.

Storyboards to Final

There were two distinct phases in our development cycle: before our tools were ready for cutscene creation and after we had the tools we needed. When we didn’t have the tools ready, I pre-visualized a large number of the cutscenes as rough storyboards so the animators were able to build up the pieces we needed to create these cutscenes.

In this sequence, our nameless protagonist witnesses their two friends getting into an argument and having a falling out, and goes out of their way to have a heart-to-heart with one side of this friend group. I handed these storyboards out to the animation team for general story direction, as well as the art team for a rough idea of the interior environments.

The final shipped product. Animation by Armando Wilderman, timed and finalized in-game by me.

Rough 3D Layout to Final

The story beat for this scene went something akin to “the main character seeks advice from their old college friend at her work.” Using a screenshot of the existing environment, I quickly drew over a little sketch envisioning a rough layout of where the characters will be placed in the scene, emphasizing more on strong poses to make it read within a glance.

With the sketch approved, I built a very rough 3D layout of this story beat in Unity with timing and readability in mind, using whatever existing animations already existed within our animation library for efficiency.

The final shipped product. Animation by Cedric Adams, timed and finalized in-game by me.