My Self – 5 days, one game

Long story short, I spent 5 days on making a game. The result is “My Self”. A First Person Shooter focused on the avatar’s heart rate.

The game is downloadable here : My Self

There’s a lot of think I didn’t have time to add, fix, enhance. Other that were coded but never used in level design… but a deal is a deal. 5 days, not a single more!

I strongly recommend playing with sound and an Xbox game pad as vibrations have a crucial role in the experience.

NB: There are 3 different ends!

Enjoy

Ghost Recon Future Soldier is available

Hope you’ll like it guys, there’s a bit of myself into it!

Rendez-vous on the level design page to know more about my own map.

Game’s Reviews (all excellent )

• Metacritic score

Iterative design

Designs should be made with intentions, oriented toward player’s experience. What do I want my player to feel? (see game spots)

Choosing an intention is the fun part – cause we don’t really need to look for one, we always have a whole bunch of funny & crazy ideas. The hardest part comes when you need to keep those intentions alive in a full working and tweaked design. To be fun, situations need to work and that often means compromises.

When mastery over learning leads to mastery over fun

Games work with mechanisms. Each mechanism has a fun potential that comes out when it is put together with others. Some are obvious and often define what your game is about. Others are more subtle, untold. They tend to appear more or less late in players’ experience but thoroughly deepen it. A player’s approach and appreciation of a situation severely depends on her knowledge of theses mechanisms. Mastery of her experience needs you to know exactly which tools she has, what mechanism she knows.

Make a brain out of your team

When working in the video game industry, you have to deal with a lot of people. People full of  talent, creativity, knowledge and experience. I often see them as cells. To me, winning the game is about making a brain out of these cells.

Game spots : seize control of your game

This article follows the previous one about game spots.

As seen before, it’s important to make sure players don’t miss them. Being able to analyse your game and find spots is a good thing. It’s a good analytic tool you can use to tweak your gameplay or situations… better late than never.

But what a shame to use them like this as they can be used as an active design tool.

Pushing the player toward the fun factor

Sometime players just miss the spot.

Did you never had this case where you tried a game, got bored and stop playing. Then, later, saw a friend playing and said “What ? You can do that in this game ? I didn’t notice, awesome!” or just found out that playing in a specific way would make the game more fun ?

Another example are games with vague objectives like Minecraft or Dwarf fortress. Some get totally hooked and others totally lost.

The variation acceptance or the art of putting the problem before the solution

It is most likely that some of you had the opportunity to say or be told : “We should do [put a design idea / technical modification / anything new here] ! You may not agree but I’ll explain …”

Welcome

Welcome to my personal portfolio.

I am Gameplay designer at CDProjekt RED, on Cyberpunk 2077.

Here I’ll share my thoughts and experience, talk about my vision of the video game industry and show some of the projects I worked on.

Have a nice tour !