Félix Belthoise

Game Developer & Game Designer

Hello and welcome! I’m Félix, a french octopus designer, freelance gamedev, jam lover and music player.

By day, I work as a developer & level designer with indie studio La Belle Games and VR/XR studio Sirène Rouge Games ; and by night I search the internet for tiny, forgotten, discreet or unfinished but creative indie games that I share on my blog, A Piece of Heart.

I’m also a member of the french collective Sous Les Néons which experiments new ways to experience video games through installations and performances. It gave especially birth to Playformances, a wonderful mix of theatre and live video game play!

Here you can discover the various projects I worked on, and follow the upcoming ones on my social medias =)

Other

Jams

Mauvaises Herbes (2021 - 2022)

Experience the rise of a self-sufficient community in the early
days of climate change awareness by playing Jude, a skeptical engineer
who doesn’t seem to belong here.

Design of an adventure & puzzle game

Prototyped the main mechanics
Development in C# with Unity

Mauvaises Herbes is a graphic adventure game in development, about ecology and anarchism. The team was made up of 2 artists, 1 writer/narrative designer, 1 sound designer/composer, and myselft as game designer & developer. We worked on the project during 2021 & 2022, we cancelled it in early 2023 due to a lack of time to allocate for the project.

After a long period purely focused on research and design, during which we produced a large amount of documentation (Game Design Document, Narrative Design Document, Graphic Bible, Character concepts…), we started a pre-production in June, 2022.

As a developer, a lot of time was spent designing the code architecture. At that time, I learned to use Class Diagrams (images available below – watching it a few years later is a quite hard but please be indulgent ! This was a necessary step in my understanding of game development =) ) and apply SOLID principles in my code, especially Interface Segregation & Dependency Injection to decouple objects and make the code much more modular. With two very different gameplay parts to take care of (side-view dialogues & top-down puzzle), I’ve been constantly challenged in multiple ways. We were taking advantage of the Yarn Spinner Tool to integrate dialogues smoothly. This was also one of the first projects in which I had to think about code architecture to support a full development.

As a game designer, I worked on a large range of tasks ranging from top-down game design (from theme to mechanics), 3C game design, mockup & UI to target audience identification and Key Selling Points. Main inspirations for the game include Mutazione (Die Gute Fabrik, 2019), The Red Strings Club (Deconstructeam, 2018) and Assemble with Care (Ustwo Games, 2019), from which we analyzed the gameplay alternance between dialogues and puzzles. We were also strongly influenced by Hannah Nicklin’s Multiple Middle theory, which offers a way to deliver a strong narrative experience while having a pre-existing plot.

Beeing both Developer and Game Designer on this project is very a powerful mix, making me iterate that much quickly, rapidly testing out new ideas and see them in motion.

Other key roles are dispatched across the team: communication, business and producing. We experimented different production process, such as small rushes that make us focus on developing and testing one single feature in just a few days.

> Deadline (2022)

You play a screenwriter once known for his acclaimed thrillers scripts. Tormented by an impostor syndrome and some rather common everyday-life issues, he looks for new sources of inspiration, while inexorably becoming obsessed with murder.

Design of a modern text-based adventure game
Made in 3 weeks
Development in C# with Unity
Play on itch.io

This 3-weeks project was made as a team of 5 people: 3 narrative designers, 1 artist and myself as a game designer & developer. Due to the high number of narrative designers, we decided to go for a highly content-based game, inspired by old text-adventure games such as Colossal Cave Adventure (1975) or The Hitchhicker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984), and adding a touch of « form conveys meaning » principle by working on text animations.

One strength of traditional text adventure games lies in the strong feeling of freedom perceived by the players, by typing commands into the console to interact with the game. Sadly, it is often frustrating to go back to these games today, due to the high difficulty, the lack of clear directions and the very rigid interface. > Deadline was the occasion to think about these design issues, build a more appealing & modern text-based adventure game, and find a way to give a second breath to this previously shining genre.

Thinking about the way to present information to the player was key to solving part of the problem. Here you actually have two pannel: one displaying the narrator’s voice with a description of the environment and situation you’re in ; and another one displaying the character’s emotions voices talking to you (Disco Elysium-style, yes we used it as a reference like 80% of narrative-based games in 2022, but eh you can’t do like it doesn’t exists). Each item the player can use is underlined in the text, and a third pannel shows the currently available verbs the character can perform, pointing the player to the actions he/she can try in the current situation.

Development-wise, it wasn’t difficult to lay out the main code for the game, only reproducing the behaviour of a simple console with parsing and execution. Most of my time was spent of creating easy-to-use tools for dialogues integration (using .json files) and text animations using the TextMeshPro plugin. The narrative designers and artists were then free to integrate and tweak everything themselves.

Reflecting on this project, the tools were too heavy to use and manipulate, for both the narrative designers and myself, but being confronted to the challenge of developing a heavy text-based game was proven to be very valuable to understand the dos and don’t of dialogue integration.