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
UNSTRANGE WORLD (School project | Oct. 2016 - Jan. 2017)
RPG | Coop 2-4 player | PC
Engine: Unity
Roles: Game Artist, Level Builder, Crowdfunding Manager
The point of this exercise was to make us a work on a project with an "indie" way of thinking, by only expressing a general intention to then make iterations about it that would decide the gameplay. In our group of 5 students (4 Game Designers and 1 Programmer), this idea was to have "a game with a similar ambiance to pen & paper role-playing games." On top of that, we also had to prepare a mock Kickstarter campaign, with everything it implies.
With Unstrange World, we tried to create a universe open to the players' interpretation, based on simple interactions with the level's elements. For having a player able to act as a "Game Master", we simplified Unity's editor so they could easily build levels and stories from the elements we had prepared.
For my part I gave a hand for code from time to time, but most of my work was to produce assets for the prototype since Game Artists were not involved in this project. Despite my lack of experience and knowledge when it comes to art, I managed to draw and colour props and, last but not least, to create and animate players' characters. This allowed me to discover a few 2D art best practices, but I also learned about 2D assets integration and animation using Unity. Moreover, I did some self-teaching about the animation software Spriter.
Using these assets I created, I took care of level building, based on the level designed by a teammate.
The rest of the time I had been taking care of the Kickstarter campaign. This included establishing the needed funds and the budget plan, finding ways to build up a community around the project, deciding the general tone and content of the Kickstarter page, selecting dates, writing the video script, establishing plans for PR and communication (including cross-promotion, press & physical interventions), imagining perks, stretch goals and ways to increase backers' engagement, preparing some Q&A, and deciding strategies depending on the campaign's success or failure.
Even if we did not manage to fully convince the school jury with this project, the demo level looked quite fun in our playtesters' hands, as shown in this video.
Teammates: Isabelle Lallemand (Producer, Game Designer, Programmer), David Liu (Level Designer), Julien Lorans (Game Designer), Yann Desmarais (Programmer)