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
NATTO'N EPIC QUEST (Exchange project - Game Jam | July 2014)
Puzzle-Beat'em all | 1 player | PC
Engine: Cocos2D
Roles: Game & Level Designer, Sound Designer, Producer
Here is the story of an unfortunate boy who angered a witch, who then cursed him: until the boy gathered enough natto (a Japanese dish made of fermented bean) for the witch to eat, he will turn into a girl every time he is out of sunray's reach. Entering a strange magical cave where he expects to find some natto, the boy discovers that he can change gravity when being himself and that he gained tremendous strength as a girl, allowing him (her?) to beat out monsters.
During my one-month stay at Trident College of Information Technology, in Nagoya (Japan), we held a multicultural game jam mixing Japanese students and exchange students from my school. By teams of 5, we had a week to come up with a prototype and a presentation of a game based on the keyword "reversible".
Considering that the Japanese students were not very confident in their English skills, communication was a tough point to deal with. However, thanks to drawings, signs and online translators, we mostly managed to understand each other and could pull off the game's concept within a day of brainstorming. Our goal back then was to create something we felt would make Japanese people laugh, thus the gender-swap and the silly story.
Being the only Game Designer of the team, I also ended up being the team leader with the assistance of the only other French student from my group, a 5th-year game artist. The Japanese students handled the programming so once we were set on the gameplay I made some level design mock-ups. This way, they would only have to re-create them in the software using assets provided by game artists. The rest of the time, I was preparing the presentation and I was collecting sounds from a databank for the sound design. I also took my first steps on FL Studio in an attempt of creating some original music for the game. But, since I had almost no musical background, it did not end up being something enjoyable to listen to.
In the end, the prototype was not really satisfying: if we had the main gameplay implemented, there were so many bugs that we could not really play. In my opinion, we had underestimated the amount of work such a game require considering our communication issues. Moreover, because we made the prototype on Cocos2D, the programmers had to make everything from scratch, making us lose much more time than if we had used Unity.
Teammates: Charly Bonhomme (Game Artist), Akane Nishimura (Game Artist), Misato Ukai (Programmer) , Tamoaki Yamauchi (Programmer)
