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
ROB'N SON 3000 (School project | Sept. 2015 - Jan. 2016)
Beat'em up | Coop 2 players | PC
Engine: Stencyl
Roles: Game & AI Designer, Programmer
Two great adventurers, Rob and his son, discovered a mysterious land and a strange artifact with it. It appeared to be a machine for two people to control, one being in charge of the upper part and the other dealing with the lower part. However, as they took control of the artifact, hordes of robotics guardians attacked them from everywhere! They will have to fight if they want to come back home from this adventure...
Rob'n Son 3000 is a beat'em all for two players, where they have to beat up waves of enemies in an arena. But since each of them controls half of the robot, they will have to coordinate to be able to survive and pull off the more powerful blows!
By the end of our second year, our teachers wanted us to discover the difficulties of discovering a new engine and gave us 2 and a half days to create a prototype on Stencyl without explaining why. By teams of 6, we had to create a game based on two random universes, ours being "Mysterious Island" and "Robots".
We came up with the general idea of the game with the whole team, then game designers filled in the blanks regarding gameplay (for example, to make it more interesting having two players needing to synchronize, we made it so some moves would be more powerful if both went in the same direction, like punching upward while jumping). Then we had to deal with the prototype programming, and having no programmer was not a big issue since the software works with visual scripting. Moreover, we already knew two days before the beginning of this exercise that the engine would be Stencyl, and we used those two days to teach ourselves how to use it with official tutorials. For my part, I had been in charge of designing the enemies' behaviour and managed to integrate three of them in the prototype within a day.
However, we came across problems we had not expected within the last hours, such as discovering that they were no way to merge two version of a project into one. Since we had done the enemies and the players' character in two separate versions, we had to redo the scripting for one of them into the other's version of the project. We ended up having a buggy (but still playable) prototype because of that. We had learned the hard way that we did not make enough researches beforehand on the engine.