How an Art Team Created Lived-In Scenes for a Detective Game

Introduction

We are Forget-Me-Not Studios, a team of nine students from the fifth year of the Game program at Rubika Supinfogame. Within this team, five Artists were responsible for the entire artistic production of 12 Memory Lane, a narrative investigation game developed as our final-year project.

The art team is composed of Lola Huguenin (Lead Artist & Environment Artist), Hermance Bertrand (Art Director & Environment Artist), Ambrine Hornain (Environment Artist), Léna Déhaies (Environment & Material Artist), and Quentin Polaillon (2D & Concept Artist).

Together, we handled the visual direction of the project, from early concepts to the final in-game environments. At Rubika, the fifth-year project aims to replicate professional production conditions and reach industry-level quality. For us, it was also an opportunity to formalize our collaboration as a small studio, with clearly defined roles, production constraints, and a shared artistic vision.

This is how Forget-Me-Not Studios was formed and how 12 Memory Lane came to life. The game focuses on a constantly shifting house, explored through the fragmented memories of its main character, looking for clues in the environment to find what happened to his missing family. This strong narrative foundation shaped our artistic ambitions and set the groundwork for the technical and visual challenges discussed throughout this article.

12 Memory Lane

From the project's early stages, our artistic direction was centered on the idea of a melancholic journey through memory. The experience takes place in a large, warm English country house, primarily inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement in architecture.

Our initial intention as a team was to design environments with a strong attention to detail, allowing each room and object to subtly convey fragments of past lives to players who take the time to observe. This approach is particularly reflected in spaces such as the cabinet of curiosities, which embodies the idea of a lifetime's worth of collected memories.

To reinforce the sense of time passing, we intentionally introduced more modern elements into the house, as if multiple generations had lived there over the years. This concept was very important to us, as it allowed us to bring a twist to our artistic direction.

We didn't want to create just another gothic, creepy mansion, which was not the direction we wanted for 12 Memory Lane. This resulted in a deliberate blend of contemporary equipment and older, timeworn features, helping the environment feel authentic, layered, and lived-in.

Throughout the project, we gathered hundreds of references on a Miro Board, especially for each room in the house. However, our artistic direction was mainly guided by two key influences: the mansion from American Horror Story Season 1, for its Arts and Crafts style, and the manor from Knives Out, for its modern aesthetic and its approach to creating distinctive interior identity.

Composition & Blocking

Before working on individual rooms, our priority was to design the house as a whole. We needed a layout that felt coherent and believable, while also supporting smooth navigation and clear gameplay progression. The order in which the player discovers the rooms is directly tied to the narrative chapters, so spatial logic and accessibility were essential from the very beginning.

To iterate quickly on different layouts during re-production, we adopted an unconventional but highly efficient solution: we built our first house iterations in The Sims 4. This allowed us to rapidly place walls, doors, and windows at the correct scale, while freely navigating the space in 3D. Given our tight production schedule, this approach proved to be a major time-saver.

Once a layout was validated with the level design team, we translated these measurements into proper architectural floor plans. A contact working in architecture helped us turn our layouts into realistic and plausible plans, as we really wanted the house to feel real. Using these floor plans, we created the global blockout directly in Unreal Engine 5 by placing the plans at scale on a plane inside the engine and building over them.

Once the overall structure of the house was set, we moved on to blocking out each room individually. 12 Memory Lane is designed with a strong cinematic atmosphere in mind, and environmental storytelling is a core pillar of the experience. Each room had to reflect the lives of its former inhabitants and convey narrative information through composition alone.

We approached each room as a cinematic shot. We started by defining a fixed camera angle, usually placed at the entrance of the room, representing the player's first impression of the space. The entire composition was then built around this initial shot, guiding the player's eye to reinforce the intended mood.

The first room we developed was Elaine's workshop, the protagonist's wife. This room was created at the end of pre-production and served as a visual benchmark for the rest of the house. Our 2D artist first produced several concept artworks to establish the atmosphere and reflect Elaine's personality.

From there, we iterated on the blockout, refining it progressively. This process helped us create an efficient asset list, anticipate technical needs, and accurately calibrate the lighting. We then applied the same methodology to every other room in the house.

Modeling Approach & Asset Variety

Since the architecture of the house remains consistent throughout the environment, we used a modular workflow for walls, floors, and structural elements. The props were modeled in 3ds Max, based on real-world references to stay as close to realism as possible.

We reused several meshes across the environment and created variety by changing textures and materials, which helped save time while avoiding repetition. All retopology was done manually, with meshes designed to be optimized from the start.

As the project focused on environment assets, we aimed to keep the polygon count as low as possible while maintaining enough detail for realistic visuals. This balance was essential to ensure good performance in the game engine while supporting detailed storytelling.

Texturing Workflow

The first step in our texturing workflow was referencing real-life furniture to understand how different surfaces react to lighting and their environment. This helped us develop a classic PBR texturing approach, with particular attention given to roughness variations to achieve a realistic and authentic result.

We then integrated textures in Unreal Engine using material instances based on two main master materials: one for opaque assets and one that supported transparent materials. These master materials exposed parameters to touch up the texture's hue, Brightness, tiling, overall Roughness, and normal intensity, allowing us to iterate quickly in-engine.

Textures Setup

During pre-production, we decided to pack our Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Metallic into the RGB channels of a single texture, reducing the standard five PBR maps to three: the Base Color, Normal, and ORM. This setup helped us considerably lower texture memory usage in a project expecting a high number of assets.

Most surfaces in the environment, such as walls and floors, were textured using tileable materials created in Substance 3D Designer or sourced from Megascans. The UVs were unwrapped by hand in 3ds Max. Consistent texel density was maintained across assets to support realistic PBR texturing.

Assets requiring specific textures were packed into atlases to keep memory usage low, with resolutions ranging from 1024x1024 to 4096x4096 based on texel density. Atlases were in the majority grouped by rooms for furniture, or asset themes, for smaller props such as artistic tools or books, to reduce draw calls as the player enters new environments.

Surface Breakdown

Since 12 Memory Lane features an old-fashioned interior environment, wallpapers with varied patterns and colors were used throughout the project. To optimize their production, we created a tileable wallpaper material in Substance 3D Designer with customizable parameters.

Its parameters allowed us to input alpha or contrasted flat-color masks as patterns, which the material would adapt to the wallpaper's weave and threads, rather than simply masking the color, to maintain a high level of realism.

This level of authenticity was primordial to us, in an environment where the player would be confronted with the walls of narrow corridors in first-person view.

We then exported an .sbsar file of this material, allowing every artist to easily generate custom wallpapers from Substance 3D Painter. One of the parameters, a wear slider controlling the spread of the material's damage mask, allowed us to quickly export several versions of each wallpaper: clean, aged, and torn.

These versions of the texture were then used for vertex painting in Unreal Engine to add variation and break the visible tiling and monotony of walls. We created additional parameters in the material instance to be able to create more wear, Roughness, and variations directly into the engine.

We also used a planar shader to apply the materials onto the wall modules, allowing us to freely move and scale modules to iterate quickly with level art.

Final Composition & Level art

After establishing the cinematic compositions during the blockout phase, we focused on populating each room with details. As a narrative puzzle game, it was crucial to highlight gameplay elements, particularly interactive objects tied to the puzzles. A key gameplay mechanic involves objects that constantly change form when interacted with.

Some objects also change position when out of the camera's view, adding confusion for the player. This required careful consideration of prop placement: we needed to emphasize puzzle-related objects while ensuring the scene composition remained coherent and visually appealing, even as objects moved dynamically within the environment.

At the same time, we paid close attention to environmental storytelling. Posters, small personal items, and seemingly insignificant details were deliberately placed to convey the history of the house's inhabitants. Decorative post-its scattered throughout the environment, left by Henry himself, sometimes serve as subtle clues about his past and memories, reinforcing the narrative through the set dressing.

By carefully balancing gameplay visibility, cinematic composition, and environmental storytelling, we were able to create rooms that are both functional for puzzles and rich in narrative detail.

Lighting Process

During pre-production, the team decided to use Lumen and the real-time dynamic lighting system of Unreal Engine 5.5, due to several gameplay-related constraints. Our main challenge was dealing with the constraint of having only one directional light for all the rooms on the house level. This limitation forced us to rely on various techniques to fake natural light coming through the windows and achieve a nostalgic look.

With this setup, lamps and artificial lighting became a key part of our workflow. We used IES lighting profiles along with volumetric fog to enhance the dusty atmosphere. We also relied on the Blueprint system to save time and reuse the same lamp setups across the different rooms of the house.

One feature that saved us a significant amount of time was the Sky Light Leaking option in the Post Process Volume. It allowed us to lift the darkest areas and avoid completely pitch-black spaces. Even though we enjoy strong contrast as artists, it was essential to ensure that gameplay props remained clearly visible to the player at all times.

After setting up the lighting, we spent time creating specific color LUTs for each room. Every room has its own post-process and atmosphere. We approached lighting as an emotional palette, reflecting the personality of the person inhabiting each space.

Conclusion

The project took around eight months of full-time production to complete. This long development period allowed us to iterate on the environments, improve gameplay readability, and polish the experience. After the end of the school year, we spent time fixing and refining the project to ensure the game was fully playable and ready for release on Steam.

One of the main challenges we faced with this project was building a complete investigation game while keeping a strong balance between gameplay, performance, and storytelling. We had to maintain good optimization and visual coherence across a full interior environment, while making sure that puzzle-related objects were always readable and never lost in the decor.

Another important challenge was working as a team. Clear communication was essential to avoid losing production time and to keep the environment consistent, especially with a large number of assets and shared technical constraints. This project taught us how important planning and pre-production are when working on a long-term project.

We learned to think about optimization early, maintain visual consistency across an entire interior, and build environments that support environmental storytelling without harming gameplay readability. Working in a team also helped us improve our communication and production organization.

What would we recommend to other beginning artists like us? Good references make good art. Do not be afraid to spend time researching and collecting references, even if it feels time-consuming at first. Planning your workflow and pre-production properly is essential when starting a long project.

These steps help avoid mistakes later and make the production process much smoother and more efficient. We hope this article was helpful and offered some valuable insights into our process! Thank you for reading us, and feel free to try 12 Memory Lane on Steam for free! The Forget Me Not team.

Team: 

• Lola Huguenin: LinkedIn, ArtStation,
• Hermance Bertrand: LinkedIn, ArtStation.
• Ambrine Hornain: LinkedIn, ArtStation.
• Léna Dehaies: LinkedIn, ArtStation.
• Quentin Polaillon: LinkedIn.

Forget-Me-Not Studios

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine