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
JUST A MARBLE GAME PROTOTYPE
(Personal project | March 2019)
Unsorted | PC
Engine: Unreal Engine
Solo project (Game & Level Design, Programmer)
Because my last projects and jobs had me working exclusively with Unity for over a year, I decided to refresh a bit my Unreal Engine skills, by doing a little project from scratch in the span of 5 days (only the Starter Content was allowed, no game preset). The point was to create something simple yet pretty fun, that would a bit more chaotic than my usual projects, while still leaving me some time to do some level design.
That is why I came up with this physics-based, half-golf half-marble game prototype, in which the player shoots a marble and tries to hit others. I also pushed myself to only work on this project during business hours (except for publishing), so it would put me daily deadlines and help me maintain an active lifestyle.
Here is a little 40-second video showing some gameplay extracts from a playtest done by the end of the week.
I (re)discovered a lot about the engine thanks to this project, and I was especially surprised of how much time I had to spend designing and scripting the User Interface (about a third of the total time!).
I still got to try a few different approaches regarding the controls and camera. I also tried to create levels (4 + the tutorial) of various styles and by using different tools (Basic Shapes, terrain...), that would show directions a complete game based on this concept could have gone for (completely relying on physics, "parkour", accuracy trials...). If I had more time, I would have probably tried creating an "exploration" level with marbles hidden across a bigger map, and I would have perhaps tried implementing a versus mode.
The game still takes about 15-20 minutes to beat the first time though.
