Sip Of Sanity
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About
“Sip of Sanity” is an indie cozy horror game where players explore the mysterious, off-the-grid town of Coldridge, delivering various brews to peculiar customers in order to either uncover the town’s secrets or find a way to escape.
Primary Role:
Lead Level Designer
Secondary Role:
Game Designer
Engine:
Unreal Engine 5
Team Size:
10
Status:
Demo coming out on steam Q2 2026
Main contributions
- Designing levels and gameplay experience for our target audience
- The gathering mechanic core to the game play loop
- A variety of LD ingredients for both day and night cycle
- Landscape Iteration and bug-fixing for the inside and outside areas of the world
- Collaborate with artist for effective set dressing
As a co-founder
- Supervising design interns (including contracts, interviews and career growth plans)
- Office and team building management
- Community management
- Lead meetings and company growth
- Organizing play testers for QA sessions
Early Development
As a level designer, during the project’s early stages I documented world partition pipelines, landscape pipelines and level collaboration pipelines in confluence on top of exploring and finding what works and what’s fun. Example: (document)
During this early development I applied my experience with the landscape and foliage tools which I used to create the blockout for the open world.
Some video showcases of the blockout levels made within the first 2 sprints and a gas station I made which also included a inside store inspired by ”Easy Delivery Co”, one of our reference games
Level Design
As a level designer, I had ownership over the latest iteration of the town and the explorable open world
I worked with level artists and designers to settle on the vision for both the inside and outside spaces: delivery points, size, unique encounters, day & night cycles. On top of that, memorable places or ”weenies” like the Light House I took inspiration from Dredge to use as anchor points and landmarks for navigating the world. The light house quickly became a liked and recognizable landmark because it indicated clearly where the player’s main hub is located.
I created paper & digital ideas, for both the inside and outside spaces then worked on the levels from blockout to presentable versions.
1. Sketches - town rework
2. Sketches - open world
Sketches I've made throughout the iteration process of the main level
3. Set dressing
My experience with the foliage tool and landscape tool, in collaboration with art I created a document for set dressing metrics (document)
LD Ingredients
As a level designer, I had ownership over a few level ingredients that were used throughout the levels that contributed towards both the horror and cozy experience we were going for. Here are some of them:
1. Web Trap
Designed to spawn only during higher insanity levels it slows the player car down when passed through.
If passed through while boosting it burns and give the player an extra boost!
The VFX and SFX were also made by me.
2. Geometry collections
Using Geometry collection and some physics tweaking I created a geometry collection blueprint base class allowing the creation for variety of breakable objects.
I later used various assets with it that can be placed around the world, such as signs, road barriers, repair kits moving on a spline and many other assets.
This created a more responsive world for the player
3. Modular Camper
A modular camper blueprint I made for one of our intern artists. She made the modular piece kit and I created this blueprint for them to use during set dressing. For marketing I also made a little showcase of the asset for social media.
Gathering Mechanic
I was the product owner of the Gathering mechanic. It is a mechanic part of the core game loop used to gather ingredients from the outside space, think of it like the fishing game from ”Dredge”.
I designed the gameplay, made sure the visuals were in line with the intention of the mechanic, and I created the whole prototype of the modular pieces in engine in order to get the vision across. The mechanic showed longevity and potential so it stayed as a core mechanic.
1. Initial design
Initially the design was very ambitious. It revolved around combing the physics of the car in order to speed up the gathering progress bar, after which depending on the weight of the item extracted the car would behave differently. This of course required a deeper understanding physics and math so ultimately, I ended up physics constraint components and some faking to get it working
Marketing
Throughout the development of the game, we recorded and posted various marketing content in attempt to gather an audience before our demo release. Here are some highlights from the most engaged posts that the game has made so far that I made from ideation to creation.
