Archive

Jawbreakers

Jawbreakers is a Twin stick shooter based on bullet hell parts and a boss rush system. It was new for me to work on a bullet hell system and all the problematics and codes related to the genre. Therefore it was pleasant to work on something new. In Design, we collaborate closely to the artistic direction to be sure that we were going in the right direction.

The design of the boss pattern was done in this way, each boss pattern has to challenge the player on his placement possibilities. We designed the playground to change , according to the boss rage. The purposes of that was to create a kind of pacing based on two stages. Each stages have three rounds with different boss patterns and a playground, creating difficult game balancing.

Hero of The Rising Sun

Hero of the rising sun was a project made in partnership with gameloft. The team was composed of 22 people. Working in a team of this size in such a short amount of time was a real challenge. We were confronted with a major problem : the communication between the different departments. We suffered from a lack of clarity between the work of the different departments. This produced some problems like the visibility and timing of the animation. Nevertheless, This project allowed us to learn a lot in terms of level design and workflow. Indeed, we used a grid that increased the amount of the level design iterations done on paper. We also made animated mockups to confirm the game flow.

It was an exercise based on making a mood-video of an emotion and finally creating a level inspired by this video.

I chose the feeling of coyness. I wanted to reproduce the feeling of looking at someone in the street and becoming shy. In this fleeting instant you want to meet this person but before you have time to do something, this moment already belongs to the past.

Coyness

You know you’ll never see this person again.

This creative intention was a real challenge. This kind of feeling is hard to perfectly rationalize. I especially worked on the staging aspect and on the composition. The layout of this level had to recreate this sensation for the player, just by using a walking/Interaction gameplay.

Cloud Era

Cloud Era was a very ambitious project made for the Hits Playtime. Starting with a simple idea of creating a FPS puzzle game with the management of clouds and effects, we created a game with a few mechanics that did not fit entirely the puzzle game genre. That was our main mistake, we didn't have enough perspective and rational processes to understand that the mechanics weren’t suited for a puzzle game.

This is why we struggled in the development of the game mostly with the level design.

Concerning the level design with this kind of mechanics, it was difficult to create strong puzzles without backtracking too often. It was with this experience that I learnt a lot about rational level design. Without much experience, I tried to create a difficulty curve completely by instinct.

Climb To The Moon

Climb to the moon was a project made in partnership with OhBiBi. the project consisted of creating and publishing a polished game in only 2 weeks, with the use of amplitude in order to get feedback from the players. We thus had to focus on the controls and the balancing of the game: a delicate part because it required to test the entire game which had a play time of minimum 3 hours.

The difficulty curve had to be adapted to the audience and the controls were to be pleasant and accessible. All the level design is composed of random chunks that were included in a rational level design. This kind of process was very useful for balancing the experience in a short time.

Benoît Cassin