Winter 2018

This last winter has been my busiest semester so far at Concordia. Four games in development at the same time, including the Ubisoft Game Jam 2018. Also, I started using Substance Painter for my 3D models’ textures, as well as gaining more experience in Blender and Unity.

There’s TANK, Specter, You Are Two and Eradise. Each of them will soon have a unique entry under the Experiments section, but for now, let’s have a quick look at them.

This project is a collection itself of three little games. Each of them exploit a unique mechanic, but have the same subject on the screen. The player controls most of the time a small tank, exploring mysterious and vast surroundings. The game is an iteration of the tutorial TANK!, made by Unity Technologies Team. Here are the three mini-games included in the software:

Projection focused on the lights and cameras. In the game, all cameras are fixed, giving me access to change the environment without having the user noticing it. That way, it is possible to create confusion while still having a simple and linear path.

Dialogue is about sound. In fact, all feedback for the players is through sounds. This means that, yes there are visual, but most of the understanding and mechanics of the game rotate around sound. It was also a good topic to explore the definition of communication.

Farewell makes full use of basic 3D objects. Indeed, all the scenery in this iteration is made from simple figures provided by either Blender and Unity itself. Like in Projection, this is about confusing the player’s perception, but here, in a 3D and geometrical environment.

This is a puzzle game, with mechanics based on console commands. That said, every input from the player is recorded from a fake panel in the software. The goal is to shift spheres into empty cubes to complete a level. Although, each movement initially needs to be defined by the player with command lines. For instance : goright.

I wanted the aesthetics to be oriented with a 90′hacking feel. Inspired by old Scumm interface, Specter displays first a basic UI with mainly text and black and white colours. However, as the player finishes levels, the game tends to break more and more into a 3D environment, creating a contrast with the type of game it should be.

The game presented at the Ubisoft Game Jam 2018. I was part of a team of eight students representing Concordia at the contest. My job was related to asset creation, but I worked mainly in the design and development of the second level.

You Are Two is a game about mental illness or more precisely, bipolarity. It was in Ubisoft’s mandate that our prototypes reflect a social cause, going along the theme of this year’s edition “Changer le monde“. It’s a two-player game (obviously), where each user incarnates a character illustrating the ups and downs of the disease. There’s the rabbit, who can see through in high light environments, while the other identity, the raven, can navigate in dark areas.

While the mechanics are not that simple to understand and the physic-based engine makes some interaction clunky, I focused my work on the ambiance in the game and to make the second level an enjoyable phase. At the end, the project was a challenge and a personal experience for me.

First of all, this prototype is a collaboration with two of my colleagues and friends, Victor Ivanov and Valerie Bourdon. This was and still is an ambitious project that is going to be developed further than its current state.

The goal of the game is… non-existent. In fact, it’s a huge walking simulator where players can discover the vestige of a fallen civilization. Our vision is not to shape unique mechanics, we are more focused on the aesthetic of the environment and telling a narrative through it.

For now, we only have a small prototype, but we plan to continue working on it.