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
SMMA: CUSTOM TURTLE (Personal project | Oct. 2015)
Puzzle-Plateformer | 1 player | WiiU
Engine: Super Mario Maker
Role: Level Designer
Just a few days after starting our third year at Supinfogame, Nintendo France got in touch with the most famous video game schools of the country for a Level Design contest, called Super Mario Maker Academy. The rules were quite simple: by team of 4 students, we had 6 hours to create a level using Super Mario Maker's level editor tool. Then each people in the 8 teams would vote for the level the enjoyed the most. The selected level would then compete with the other school's during a global vote at Paris Games Week 2015, a few weeks later.
The team I was part of was composed of 3 Game Designers and 1 Game Artist and went by the name "Custom Turtle". Actually, none of us had gotten their hands on the editor before, and we discovered how to use it on the spot. However, we had already agreed on what we would do beforehand. Our goal was to make a puzzle-ish level that would cleverly exploit Super Mario World's mechanics. We carried out some researches the day before to check what was available in order to achieve this, and established the level's global construction: the player had to progress through a hub, by bringing elements from sub-levels that would open their path.
When we actually got to create the level, we split our team into two small groups, that would regularly take turns working on the different sub-levels, each of them with their own theme. This choice was made so everybody could actively work on the level without loosing too much time arguing on details, and so we would not have to all be under pressure from the beginning to then end of the contest.
In the end, our game earned the second place at our school's voting session. We assume that our level was a bit too hard from time to time (checkpoints were not implemented back then, sadly) and that we relied too much on mechanics not everybody knew about. We also did not allow enough time to testing, as proven in the official playthrough by Nintendo France that manages to skip about half the level by using exploits we did not thing about. Even though, the level collected many positive feedbacks when made available to the game's community.
You can watch a playthrough of how the level was meant to be played in this video:
Teammates: Tim Guthmann (Game Artist), Slymane Houzali (Level Designer), Axel Richet (Level Designer)