This 2-students project was made during my studies at 42 school, by using only C and the minilibx, a simple X-Window programming API.

The main part I took care of was the raycasting, a rendering technique to create a 3D perspective in a 2D map. Mine is based on the Digital Differential Algorithm, which is a fast algorithm typically used on square grids to find which squares a line hits.

I also made a simple minimap representing the player’s position inside the environment with its field of view.

Of course, every malloc had to be protected and no leaks were allowed. Thus, I designed an elegant way of freeing the memory cyclically, by using a linked list holding up all the malloc-ed memory.

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 sexy & 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). 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 quite heavy to use and far from perfect, but being confronted to the challenge of integrating heavy text-based dialogues was proven to be very valuable for my next dialogue-based project, Mauvaises Herbes!

You can find the game on itch.io.

The Social Game Jam is an event in preparation for mid-2023. It’s goal is to raise awareness about social issues, deepens the video game medium and industry by speaking about societal topics, and create a fertile gound for new commited creations.

The jam will host 4 to 8 teams of 5 or 6 people. The game’s target beeing a mainstream audience, participants will require to have a good technical level in creating games. To do so, multiple professional video game developers will be contacted and asked to form their own jam team of 3/4 people, which will guarantee each team’s balance.

In each developers team, a social worker will be added (student or professional), who will deliver the necessary knowledge and experience about the chosen topics.

Jams beeing the opportunity to meet other professional and a good way to put diversity in the spotlight, we will also add underrepresented individuals into each team. A few entries will then be specifically open to marginalized people.

The Social Game Jam will take place in 3 periods:

• First a meeting between developers and social workers, to exchange about their work and the topics they want to speak about
• Secondly a 48h producing period in which each team will work on its own prototype
• And finally, games will be exposed in the Theatre de l’Elysée in Lyon and open for everyone to play them

I have currently received support by the Lyon organizations Le Coeur et la Main (social project incubator), Lyon Game Dev and Indie Game Lyon, and am still searching for a few more partners. Stay tuned!

Extended Play is a video game analysis youtube channel I created during the pandemic, in 2020. The target audiences are regular and passionate PC players.

I’ve published the first video on November 2020, in which I speak about the multiple influences of the enigmatic Superbrothers : Sword & Sworcery, and try to give him some meaning. You will hear about music, bipede bear and Jonathan Blow’s game design philosophy.

The second video, published in May 2021, is about Sunless Skies and its gameplay, alternating between a textual adventure game and a real-time 2D exploration game. Through Failbetter Games’s history, the game’s developer, I explore the way it led to this singular gameplay and the resulting experience.