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
MOUSE ESCAPE (School project | Feb. - April 2015)
Platformer | 1 player | PC
Engine: Construct 2
Role: Level Designer
Mouse Escape is a classic platformer. The character, a mouse standing on its feet, can run, crouch, jump, walljump and swim. It has to avoid red areas, but can also jump on enemies, projectiles and bouncing platforms. There are also keys it can collect to make some special blocks disappear. And that is it.
If the game seems basic, it is because this was our first level design exercise at school. After teaching us some basics, Richard Vatinel (who was working on the indie platformer Splasher by that time) gave us a simple prototype made on Construct 2. Then the class split into groups of 5, with each member having to make 5 levels that would take about 30 seconds to complete for someone who already knew them. The goal was to consider, using tools such as game design matrix, all the different ways we could use the elements we had been given, then organise ourselves to teach everything bit by bit to the player. Of course, the more levels the player would clear, the harder the levels would become.
Since we had 25 levels to create, we decided to split them into 5 "worlds" with their own thematic, so each world would bring its own mechanics. Then, we decided which level would be used to introduce a new mechanic, which would teach the player advanced uses of this mechanic, and finally which would challenge them on what they had learned so far. We also established in which levels the different elements were supposed to appear and for what use, thus we would not end up using everything over and over and would instead build an unique experience for each level.
For my part, I tried to create levels with a good flow, that would give enough information to the player about where to head next while still being able to rush through. I also tried to give more life to the plain blocs we had to create levels by putting them in ways that could possibly remind environments (such as red areas looking like lava flows), while still keeping a "gameplay first" way of thinking. In the end, since I was the one who merged all the levels together, I created a "hub" connecting all worlds to add some narrative to the game.
You can watch a playthrough of all the levels we created in this video:
If you are looking for my work, go to 1:49 (5-1), 2:37 (2-1), 5:52 (3-2), 8:40 (4-3), 11:58 (5-5) or 12:57 (credits level). For parts of the hub, go to 2:23, 5:15, 7:44 and 10:09
Teammates: Pauline Broeckaert (Level Designer), Jules Gassie (Level Designer), Slymane Houzali (Level Designer, Producer), David Liu (Level Designer)