Birds Trip is a short in-browser game I made for a game jam on Itch.io, along with 3 other people.
You play as a bird migrating to the north, trying to keep its flock united while navigating between sharp mountains and clouded skies.
On this project, I worked on game design, developmet and debugging. I mostly worked on obstacles (behavior and collisions), mechanics (bird’s dash) and UI programming.
You can play the game here.
Mars Marine is a shooter game I did to practice on Unreal Engine 4.
You are a marine stuck on Mars and have to fight against endless waves of aliens trying to kill you. How many of them can you bring down?
Base game comes from a tutorial from GamedevTV. The tutorial included basic features: characters movement, animations and montage, aiming, standard UI (showing health, kill count, current wave, “outside area” warning message), enemies’ AI, navigation and spawn, health pick-ups.
Once the tutorial was over, I decided to add or modify some features to try a few things by myself. I modified the aiming method (from mouse used as a spinning wheel to aim at cursor) and made the timer of the warning message visible, so the player knows how long they have before dying. I also modified the health pick-ups to have different kinds, and made them spawned at random upon enemies’ death. I added a pause menu and a saved high-score system.
Download Mars Marine on Itch.io.
Rootkit is a first-person runner game, in a horror atmosphere, realized by a team of five people under Unreal Engine 4, as a graduation project.
You are a program evolving in a simulated environment, and your goal is to escape the simulation, while avoiding being catch by A.V.A., the environment’s antivirus.
For this project, I worked on several tasks.
I worked mostly on early documentation: establishing and iterating on objectives and gameplays, trying to figure out how to improve the gameplay for a better experience, what to keep and what to remove.
After that, I started an internship that left me less time for the project, so I mainly worked on small features under Unreal Engine and assisted our lead programmer on the main code.
Finally, I did a lot of QA, testing the demo again and again to identify bugs, trying to solve what I could and reporting the others to our lead programmer.
Download Rootkit on Itch.io
Une ou Deux Etoiles is a point’n’click puzzle game, with a strong narrative aspect, realized as our first group project video game, with Construct 2 engine.
You play as a astronomer rabbit, trying to pierce the secret lying behind constellations. As days pass, you become more and more obsessed with your work, letting your laboratory decline.
The game alternates between two phases. The first one is a narrative-led phase, happening on daytime, where you have to take care of daily tasks in your lab. The second phase, on nighttime, requires you to solve constellations puzzles.
On this project, I took a lot of different assignments:
I help the team leader on documentation about features, and also did some writing.
Mostly, I worked on programming and debugging on the lab part of the game, implementing, testing and iterating on features.
I also worked on level design, for the constellation part. I imagined and draw all the constellations, making sure the different type of stars were correctly placed to lessen the possibilities of the player to get it too wrong.
On a lesser way, I worked on audio too, looking for fitting musics and sounds on public databases, and implementing them in the game.
Dual Draw is a multiplayer variation of the game Pictionary, realized as a team project with my schoolmates at the very begining of our school training.
It requires a screen-sharing application allowing annotions (such as Zoom, for example). Players are splitted in two teams, and two players among each team are designated to draw. They are given a single word by the opponent team, and have to draw it and have their team guess it. It can be a compound word, or a single word that can be splitted in two existing words (for example, « necklace », which can be splitted into « neck » and « lace », and the players have to draw those word to make their team guess « necklace »).
Here is the Dual Draw support website, allowing players to easily play the game, with features including automatic team generation, timer, point counter, a list of word suggestions, and the rules (in French).
During my internship, I practiced a lot on the Construct 2 engine.
We made some original games/programs to practice specific features, but also recreated some popular games (like Tetris, Memory, Bomberman, Breakout, Sokoban), as a challenge to understand and try to develop them by ourselves.
I learned a lot of different behaviors, such as collisions/overlapping, triggers, timers, functions, loops, animation, and different ways to program them, in order to get an efficient code, all whil being as light as possible. I even learned to simulate 3D with a 2D engine!
Practicing on all those features helped me a lot to understand how game engines, and programming, in a generic way, work. It made it easier to understand UE4 when I had to work on it later, and also helped me understand faster the basics of C++ I learned by myself afterwards.
Amélie Reynaud - Game Developer