In order to complete my education, I joined Gamabilis for a 6-month graduation internship, which was followed by a contract during the first weeks of 2019. This start-up focuses on "Games for Change", a type of serious games that pushes players to question their habits and the way they live, to initiate global changes toward a better future. However, since the company is still young and have to make a living, it also develops more traditional serious games following a business-to-business model.
In order to complete my education, I joined Gamabilis for a 6-month graduation internship, which was followed by a contract during the first weeks of 2019. This start-up focuses on "Games for Change", a type of serious games that pushes players to question their habits and the way they live, to initiate global changes toward a better future. However, since the company is still young and have to make a living, it also develops more traditional serious games following a business-to-business model.
Romain Trésarrieu
Game Designer
ALIENATION ​(School project | Nov. 2014 - May 2015)
Interactive book | 1 player | PC
Engine: Flash
Role: Game Designer, Scenarist
In this game inspired by "You Are The Hero" books, the player embodies an extraterrestrial being who spends their holiday on Earth, undercover, in a psychiatric asylum. But their stay might turn short, as alien-hunters have sent representatives to this building, suspecting some kind of extraterrestrial activity. The player must then explore the asylum, gather information, find who they can trust or who are enemies among the other patients... what can be a bit tricky when your translator appears to be malfunctioning.
This project was part of our "interactive writing" courses and was carried out by 3 Game Designers, tasked do create an interactive book. For each group, we had a random topic (here being "Investigation") and constraint ("no multiple-choice questionnaire"). Since the project was to be done on Flash, this allowed us to use visuals to overcome this difficult constraint considering this game's style. That is why we used a map-like screen for navigation and we decided to handle dialogues by making players choose between icons sentences, that they would have to understand first. Thus the scenario, the setting, and the broken translator: this way, making a choice out of topic would not feel too strange, and it also allowed us to create simple puzzles by switching some words with others (for passwords for example).
Once the gameplay was decided, we split the remaining work between the 3 of us, and I was tasked with the full scenario and texts writing, and obviously with puzzles design too. I ended up writing a total of 80 pages after trying several scenario trees. In order to make it easier for the programmer, I used Word's title system (see image on the left for an extract) to refer all the choices and interactions in the game, so they could easily jump from one to another. However, I got carried away and wrote a too long scenario to integrate, and we ended up with only the introduction and first chapter (out of three chapters, along with different endings). Thus, one of the main lessons I learned from this projects was about not overdoing it.
Teammates: Louis Ledoux (Game Design, Programmer), Sylvain Schmück (Game Designer, Artist)