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
BOH'GARG PURSUIT (School project | October 2016)
Runner | Coop 2 players | PC
Engine: Unity
Roles: Game Designer, Sound Designer
Two ninja-animals accidentally awakened the great Boh’garg, the gigantic monster haunting the forest. With no other option than running for their lives, they have to avoid the many dangers on their path. But if they manage to keep up the pace and help each other, they will quickly discover they can fight back…
This runner prototype has been developed in 5 days for the French studio Enigami, who asked us to create a runner based on Shiness: The Lightning Kingdom’s universe, the game they were developing. One main constraint was that the camera had to switch from a side-view to what they called a “2.5D-view” (like in 2D The Legend of Zelda games).
We decided to create a cooperative game, inspired by the bond that links the characters in the original game, and turned it into a boss fight. When the camera would switch position, it would mean that players enter a new phase: in side-view, they are flying away from the boss, until they reached a switch to trigger a trap. Then, the camera goes for its low-angle shot position, and the characters can damage Boh'Garg by throwing back projectiles at her.
On the first days, I have been working on the game design, mostly about the game’s concept and the characters’ abilities. The main difficulty was to find interesting runner interactions for a cooperative game, so each character ended up having an ability (once again inspired by those used by Shiness’ characters) only them could use, and that was the only way preventing their ally being hit by obstacles. I also advised our programmers on how we could switch from a phase to another, and how the level would be procedurally generated.
On the next days, it has been decided I would work on the Sound Design. It was the first time I could work that much on it. I then tried to find or create sounds, to then modify and balance them to make both clear feedbacks and credible environmental noise. We ended up having 35 different sounds. But the biggest challenge I may had to deal with was the music; nobody in the team was able to compose something in such a short time, so I took royalty-free music (Volatile Reaction by Kevin McLeod). Then I cut it in different parts, depending on their intensity, and managed to loop them, so the different loops would play depending on the game phase and would smoothly fade when changing phase.
Here is what the game would have sounded like while playing.
For more details, you can head to this page.
Unfortunately, our development method was not adapted to such a scope in such a small time. We ended up having a prototype with a great lack of feedbacks, polishing and tweaking, making it impossible to play. The main problem was that our programmers had just joined the school a few weeks ago, and consequently were not familiar with the game engine. Also, we had chosen both a Project Leader and a Lead Game Designer that were not very comfortable with their role, and thus the whole team lacked foresight. I had been too confident and I was too focused on my own work to notice it. I should not had been able to spend so much time on Sound Design for such a short development time, considering that our programmers did not even have the time to implement my work. There was a lot to learn from these mistakes.
Teammates:
Game Artists:
Alice Boudry, Julie Martinez, Nicolas Hasseler
Game Designers:
Corentin Mangé, Julien Lorans, Anton Salikhov
Programmers:
David Bourel, Yoan Garnier