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
ARKOID FUSION (School project | March 2015)
Breakout | 1 player | Mobile
Engine:Unity
Role: Game & Level Designer
In our school, from second year to the fourth, we spend two weeks every year in groups mixing all students levels in order to make a game. This game is made in partnership with a game development company, that also establish some constraints about what we have to make. For my first time taking part in this exercise, we were a team of 13 students tasked by Gameloft representatives to create an homage to the classic breakout game Arkanoid, with a cartoon art style, for mobile.
With the game design team, we first tried to come up with a puzzle-like version of a breakout game, where you would have to set paddles on the screen and then release the ball so it would bounce on these pre-set paddles and destroy all the blocks on screen. But it did not feel "Arkanoid" enough for the representatives, so we went for a classic version of breakout but with special events inspired from other classics such as Pac-Man, Snake or Bomberman. From time to time, these characters would appear on screen, and destroy or add blocks, so the player has to exploit them to get a higher score or to clear the level faster. When later during these two weeks, we discovered another constraint asking us to put references to old games, we knew we had made a good choice.
Once the game design was set, my task was to create levels. But before I could set the actual blocks in Unity, I first made some searches for interesting levels using... RPG Maker, taking advantage of its tile system. This, way, the developers had enough time to code the ball's behaviour along with the different blocks we had asked for, and I only had to set these blocks into the prototype by copying what I had done before. I also tried to sneak some references to other games by "drawing" with blocks from time to time, and finally came up with 32 different levels.
We younger designers were also asked to come up with a few power-ups ideas, and, since the game was supposed to be a free-to-play, we also had to think about what could be bought in-game (what mostly came in the form of new game modes and more oldies-based events). However, this last point did not make it to the final version.
Teammates:
Game Artists:
Nicolas Nowak (2nd year), Victor Depardieu (2nd year), Jordan Jaminet (3rd year), Grégoire Eymon (3rd year), Myriam Dufrier (4th year)
Game Designers:
Valentin Cebo (2nd year), Alexandre Gueritey (3rd year), David Delseray-Pousse (3rd year), David Rabineau (4th year), Jean-Pierre Morieux (4th year)
Programmers:
Robin Mathieu (3rd year)