Carmen Sandiego looks to captivate audiences across mobile, console, and PC
For the past four decades, the globe-trotting adventures of Carmen Sandiego have captivated fans with their unique blend of education and entertainment. But despite the longevity and popularity of the slickly-presented series, control of the thieving ring leader of the Villains International League of Evil (VILE) has never been put into the hands of players—until now.
Carmen Sandiego is a new single-player puzzle-adventure game that shines the spotlight on the iconic super thief. In it, players will access an arsenal of state-of-the-art gadgets while on an international adventure where collecting clues and deciphering codes is the key to outsmarting elusive criminals.
To bring this adventure to life, developer Gameloft Brisbane chose Unreal Engine 5 for its versatility and ability to create a visually compelling and dynamic experience across multiple platforms.
So, why was this the right time to put players in the shoes of Carmen Sandiego? Which specific features of Unreal Engine helped the team achieve its goals? And how did the developers optimize the experience across a wide range of platforms? We recently caught up with Gameloft Brisbane to do some detective work of our own.
Carmen Sandiego is an iconic character who has been around since 1985, but fans of the series have never actually been able to play as her in a game until now. Why was this the right time to finally let players take on the role of the vigilante herself?
Cassie McDonnell, Game Community Manager: Since her debut in 1985’s Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Carmen has captivated fans worldwide with her daring escapades. Originally introduced as a master thief and VILE’s brilliant leader, fans have spent decades asking “where is Carmen?” but few have asked “who is Carmen?” Building on the success of the 2019 Netflix series, the time felt right to dive deeper into her character. Now, players can experience her story first-hand, stepping into her shoes as she turns the tables on VILE and redefines what it means to be Carmen Sandiego.
Can you tell us a little bit about the game? What will players actually be doing throughout their adventure?
Cassie McDonnell, Game Community Manager: Carmen Sandiego is a single-player, premium puzzle-adventure game with no in-game purchases or online play. Staying true to her legacy, players will embark on a global journey using geography skills to determine their suspects’ next location, gathering clues to identify VILE operatives, issuing warrants, and making arrests. Alongside these classic elements, the game offers new features like explorable real-world locations, mini-games such as safe cracking, stealth shadowing, gliding, and rooftop traversal using Carmen’s gadgets.
Can you give us some examples of the gadgets people will utilize?
Cassie McDonnell, Game Community Manager: In the words of Carmen Sandiego, “a lady needs her tools”. Players will be able to take to the skies with Carmen’s glider, follow VILE operatives through picturesque locations, traverse rooftops with her trusty grappling hook, and track down suspects using her spy goggles that have night, infrared, and thermal imaging.
Geography obviously plays a key role in the experience. How did you go about selecting the locales that ended up being in the game?
Daniel Fisher, Lead Designer: As a studio, we came together working from both the old games and new Netflix adventures to pick culturally diverse and exciting locales across the world. Often, we were informed by the global mix of locations that are present across the entire Carmen Sandiego franchise, but occasionally a favorite emerged with strong cultural ties from the diversity we have in our own studio. There also may have been a soft spot for our very own Brisbane, Australia.
Can you tell us a little about how you translated the art style of the Netflix TV series for the game and about the creative choices that influenced the subtle differences between the two styles?
Hannah Crosby, Lead Artist: Translating the style of the Netflix series into our game meant bringing some of the 2D graphic elements that made up the iconic series look into our 3D characters and environments.
Those graphic elements include rectangular light-flares on light sources, flat-colored stylized water FX, and a crisp rim-light that is always present around the characters. We incorporated textural patterns present in the backgrounds of the Netflix series into our materials to create a hand-drawn feel to the environments. We also brought the distinctive shape language of the character designs into our 3D models, using flat plane changes to replicate the angular 2D style.
Amee Woods, Concept Artist III: The Netflix series brings Carmen Sandiego to life with bold, sharp silhouettes and distinct, stylized shapes—a quality we aimed to capture in 3D. Translating that signature look required us to think in terms of strong, clean shapes that would maintain her iconic look from every angle.
A unique feature of the show is its rich textures and decorative, hand-drawn motifs, which we meticulously recreated by designing custom brushes for our environment elements, ensuring the same tactile, artistic feel. Another major influence was the color palette—the Netflix series gives each city its own vibrant, unique colors, and we referenced those palettes to help the game’s settings feel authentic and familiar.
Carmen Sandiego is set to launch on Netflix for mobile initially before rolling out to PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Considering how popular Carmen Sandiego is, how important was it for you to reach as wide an audience as possible across multiple platforms?
Manea Castet, Studio Manager: Carmen Sandiego is a truly global icon with a fanbase spanning generations, cultures, and backgrounds. Releasing on multiple platforms allows fans everywhere to engage with her story, from those who grew up with Carmen to new players discovering her for the first time.
Why was Unreal Engine a good fit for this project?
Liz Ballantyne, Studio Art Director: Using Unreal Engine enables us a balance of rich visual storytelling and interactive mechanics, ideal for a globe-trotting, mystery-solving game like Carmen Sandiego. It’s a versatile engine bringing her adventures to life in a very dynamic, visually compelling way.
How big is the team working on the game?
Manea Castet, Studio Manager: The development of the Carmen Sandiego game has marked a significant milestone for Gameloft Brisbane as the studio celebrates its 10th anniversary. The team has grown to over 100 employees, reflecting the studio’s expanding role in the Australian gaming industry.
Which UE features stood out to you the most during development? Please explain.
Liz Ballantyne, Studio Art Director: Using Unreal Engine for Carmen Sandiego brings several advantages, especially for creating a visually stunning experience that resonates with both nostalgic fans and new players.
High-quality graphics: Unreal Engine’s advanced rendering capabilities bring each global location in Carmen Sandiego to life with stunning detail and vibrant colors. From the breathtaking Aurora lights in Reykjavik to the vibrant marine life beneath the ocean in the Great Barrier Reef, Unreal allows us to craft visually distinctive, culturally rich environments that capture the essence of each location.
This level of artistry enhances the player’s sense of exploration, making every location feel immersive and inspiring a true sense of global adventure. By showcasing the unique customs, attire, and interactions of different cultures around the world, we create an inclusive experience that celebrates the diversity of global travel, making each journey as captivating as the last.
Animation and cinematics: Unreal’s Sequencer allows for high-quality cutscenes and smooth character animations, making it ideal for character-driven interactions and storytelling, which is key in Carmen Sandiego’s globe-trotting adventures, racing against time to track down VILE!
Lighting and effects: With stylized lighting, reflections, and environmental effects, Unreal adds an extra layer of realism and atmosphere to each setting, making iconic landmarks and scenes feel lively and engaging.
In a game like Carmen Sandiego where atmosphere is key, iconic locations like Tokyo’s Akasaka Market in the rain feel vibrant and moody—Neon signs cast colorful reflections in puddles, while steam rises from ramen bars, creating a cozy contrast against the cool, bustling streets.
At night, scenes can feel mysterious, with flickering lights in dark alleys enhancing the intrigue. Using dynamic lighting, we can shift the mood during the day to have dramatic sunrises or perfectly clear, blue-sky days, quickly creating a new mood and gameplay experience.
Blueprint visual scripting: Unreal’s Blueprint system allows for visual scripting, making it faster to prototype and iterate on game mechanics, without complex coding. This flexibility enables the team to quickly explore and test new gameplay ideas, facilitating rapid adjustments and experimentation. The ease of use makes it ideal for collaborative development, allowing designers, artists, and developers to work seamlessly together on new features and refine gameplay.
This system lets us expand the game in exciting ways—like gliding over Singapore’s beautiful Supertree Grove, grappling through Barcelona’s iconic Gothic Quarter, or sneaking through a busy train in Jaipur. These dynamic elements come to life quickly and efficiently, delivering new and immersive experiences for players.
Cross-platform flexibility: Unreal supports a wide range of platforms, so a Carmen Sandiego game could be optimized for consoles, PC, and mobile devices, helping us reach a broad audience, from younger players to nostalgic fans.
Do you have any tips you can share to game developers using Unreal Engine for mobile development?
Alex Stevens, Senior Engineer II: Thankfully, Unreal makes it easy to develop games across platforms. Saying that though, Unreal is quite a heavy beast by default for mobile and care must be taken when trying to hit framerate targets.
The nice thing that Unreal excels at is having a biased framework for everything, and the workflows are extremely well defined, meaning your artists and designers must generally only do things once. Then it’s up to config for optimizations, and in rare cases, taking a scalpel to each problem.
Saying this, because mobile is a very sensitive platform, you will need to keep an eye on performance regressions over development. You can use tools like Gauntlet to smoke test scenes and report performance drops, or you can do what we do and have a performance collector system that posts a screenshot, the current FPS, and a snapshot of the last 30 seconds of Insights data to our performance chat channels if framerates drop below target. This means that any testing will immediately pick up performance regressions.
We mostly get CPU bottlenecks for mobile development, so be sure to be using event-driven architectures in your code and Blueprints (instead of polling on tick). For skeletal meshes, make use of the Anim Budget Allocator plugin and be aware that using an excessive amount of skeletal mesh components setting a leader pose component will incur a heavy cost on the game thread, because animation updates on these get pushed to the game thread. Additionally, any extra captures from a capture component will incur an entire scene’s worth of render thread work. So even if you’re only rendering one mesh, you’ll be adding a couple of milliseconds worth of setup of a new render scene.
We make heavy use of Device Profiles so we can specify different quality levels on a per- chipset basis (especially useful for Android), and we can disable features if there’s known issues for certain chipsets (this has been a lifesaver). Another performance optimization that could really save your game on the GPU is that both Android and iOS have the ability to do rendering overrides at compile time for materials. For example, you can force all low-quality materials to disable roughness (fully rough) and metallic channels, saving overheads from screenspace reflections and other heavy processes on the pixel shaders of your project. This could mean the difference between making frame and not. You can check this out from the Project Settings and look for each platform’s respective “Material Quality” page.
Finally, be sure to test different settings early in your project! The difference between deferred and forward can make major differences, and even OpenGL and Vulkan depending on your project. Profiling tools like Insights and RenderDoc are absolutely your friends and becoming proficient in reading these tools will help you make more informed decisions during development and lead to successful releases.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about the game?
For more information and to sign up for updates, visit www.carmensandiego-game.com and join the conversation on our social channels:
Instagram: @theofficialcarmensandiego
X (Twitter): @carmensandiego
Facebook: Carmen Sandiego
How to install Unreal Engine
Download the launcher
Before you can install and run Unreal Editor, you’ll need to download and install the Epic Games launcher.
Install Epic Games launcher
Once downloaded and installed, open the launcher and create or log in to your Epic Games account.
Get support, or restart your Epic Games launcher download in Step 1.
Install Unreal Engine
Once logged in, navigate to the Unreal Engine tab and click the Install button to download the most recent version.