PERSONAL PROJECTS
Weeble
Weeble is a mobile game project initiated with the Angry Squirrels team and extended with Pokeet before being discarded when Gravity Goat was created.
The choice of the mobile support was made by the controls simplicity, the wish to make short games and the desire to offer a game challenging enough for gamers in need of PC when they travel.
It is a 2D game with a simple gameplay in 2 taps, imagined during a Ludum Dare, which gives the place to the players to acquire experience and not to the character in game.
We imagined a cute universe despite the burlesque violence that never falls into trash or gore.
The player flies through the level in a nest carried by two birds that must be flapped alternately to move.
The birds basically glide to keep the nest horizontal, but the player can decide to free fall by holding down the controls.
He has to be careful to not tip the nest too much when he moves so as not to overturn it and make the squirrel fall. The objective is to collect as many nuts as possible throughout the level, avoid the enemies and land safely at the end to save the larder.
A matter of light
A Matter Of Light tells the story of a young boy lost from his friends in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world. With the help of a robot head, found in a pile of scrap, capable of firing laser beams, they will together try to find their way through the ruins to find their friends.
This game is designed as a short demo section of a project with a more substantial plot.
Created with the Angry Squirrels team to contribute to the Unity 2D Challenge 2019 to highlight the new Unity content focused on 2D game making.
By the way, A Matter Of Light won this contest!
Game Jams
Our creative collective Angry Squirrels was built with the intention of making games or any other creative project and has grown over time with new artists and developers who were already creating games on their own.
We don’t all have the same availability, that’s why the Ludum Dare participations are ideal to create an event that brings us all together for a weekend.
Depending on the number of people joining us and the skills of each, we choose to make games in 2D or 3D, with more or less animations, more or less complex gameplays…
Regularly, we make timelapses of our participations to keep a trace of our work beyond the result of the playable game.
They also constitute a testimony to show that we have achieved all our assets during the given weekend.
Tree House Quest remains to this day the project which will have marked us the most within the collective but also which will have generated the most feedback beyond the Ludum Dare!
It is the story of a young boy who imagines great adventures against his older brother and younger sister to take control of the tree house in the family garden.
This childish, colorful universe, with various gameplays full of references to the games of our childhood, awakens our collective nostalgia, which certainly played a big part in the overall appreciation of the game.
In addition to the game itself, each of us had a lot of fun making it, since there were quite a few of us working on it, which allowed us to imagine a complete plot and a rather long gameplay, considering the Ludum Dare classics.
This consequent team gave us each the possibility to concentrate on a part of the gameplay/production that we liked the most and on which we could take more time to realize compared to a Ludum Dare with a classic reduced team.
We keep an up-to-date list of our games on the Angry Squirrels itch.io page and systematically make sure that our games are playable online without the need to download the build.
Indeed, during the voting phases of the games, people have very few time to test each project and the download barrier is quite prohibitive.
Making our game visible among others to be tested and rated as much as possible adds a significant marketing value after the publication of our entry.
Lego designs
One of my great passions since I was a child, beyond drawing, is building Lego. Besides playing with them, I always tried to recreate characters, sets and vehicles from my favorite universes.
Now I have kept this passion which is more oriented towards collecting but I still want to reproduce my own mockups through digital tools as the true AFOL (Adult Fan Of Lego) I am.
My big project these days is a 3D rendered video of the final battle of the Metal Gear Solid video game in Lego, like an excerpt of a Lego game playthrough from this universe. Something that will never happen given the countless rules that the Metal Gear license breaks in the good practices of Lego (e.g.: no weapons or modern war vehicles – no torture or abuse – no violence, drugs or violent language – no character sexualization…).
This desire for a video came to me while designing the model of Metal Gear Rex, the iconic mecha of the saga.
I also had fun reproducing the minifigures of the characters featured in this game scene, adding realistic scratched and fingerprinted materials, rigging and animating them.
I plan to get this mockup in real life and so I put the 1000 or so construction steps in an instruction manual inspired by the ones officially proposed by Lego.
In addition to the Metal Gear license, I also worked on mockups from other universes I love like Jurassic Park or Blade Runner and I still have many projects in mind.
Each of them will be completed in the future with an instruction manual because the AFOL community is very interested in building the mockups I’ve already shared. And I must admit that personally, I would love to have my own mockups in my collection!
Plum and Cream
Low poly model of Plum and Cream characters from the webcomic Magic Recipes.
Model and animation made using 3DS Max.
Plum and Cream have a book of magic recipes!! // Magic Recipes is a webcomic originally made by two french artists: élod (@megaelod) the illustrator, and esquimaupêche (@esquimaupeche) the scenarist! // @recettesdemagie on twitter // @magic.recipes on instagram
Rise Your Kingdom
Raise Your Kingdom is a project of making a PVP game map on Minecraft through commands blocks only. It is composed of small video episodes forming a series to show the progress of the project step by step.
In addition to having fun making interactive Lego on Minecraft, it was also an opportunity to practice 3D animation by making short intros in 3D animation for the command block episodes alternated with construction timelapses for those dedicated to the build.
For 3D animations I wanted to practice motion capture through the Kinect v2 for Windows and plugins developed by Brekel to have a low cost mocap studio at home.
But also to improve my knowledge of professional production processes by trying Motion Builder to correct the mocap recordings and to retarget the key frames of the animation.
Finally the idea was to regroup everything in 3DS Max and export my different shots via render elements and be able to do the compositing, editing and sound in After Effects to get the master ready to put online.
Obviously the time allocated to all this realization was running out on my free time and I had to stop the project after only a few episodes despite very good feedback from the Minecraft community on what I proposed.
Mods Foxhole
Foxhole is a massively multiplayer game where hundreds of players cooperate with each other to shape the outcome of a persistent online war. It is a top-down RTS where every soldier on the screen is a player.
All buildings, equipment and vehicles are produced by the players by harvesting resources, transforming them in factories and delivering them to the front line, thus giving a great deal of importance to the logistical effort, which is essential to the war effort.
I started playing Foxhole after having had great experiences on PlanetSide 2 where I found the experience of war games that I like above all: to feel the strength of numbers above the individual feat, to mix the different gameplays of infantry, tanker, logistics, farming and building all without strict rules, open world and where all coordination depends on the organization of the players themselves.
Of course, such freedom of action makes Foxhole a complex and rather difficult game to learn and even worse to master.
It’s in this context that I planned to improve my own experience by reworking the world map as a simple image beside the game but it’s while searching for graphic resources that I found the modding community and their data mining tools where you could retrieve all the assets of the game, modify them and re-implement them in the game as a mod.
At that moment, I thought that even if I had to rework the map, why not integrate it directly into the game and then share this mod with the rest of the community!
And that’s how I started my modding experience with the desire to always improve a little more the quality of life of the players and especially to help the new ones.
In the wake of the world map I again wanted to improve the readability of the interface because I find that Foxhole still lacks a big UX/UI pass and the more the game development progresses the more there are different items and resources making the inventory more and more difficult to read.
So I imagined a mod to color items and add informations around them to have at first glance the essential without having to hover over each item to read the tooltip and find the data among all the texts.
Each of my mods are designed to not betray the original Foxhole art direction with white items, brush effect backgrounds and additional information on the corner of each icon.
In the end, the strength of the community is demonstrated since the feedback from the players who use my mods feeds their improvements and also suggests new projects to come.
Beyond the UX/UI mods, I wanted for a long time to play my role as a good Frenchman and so I created a mod of WW1 French soldier skins for the Warden faction which is already the aesthetic inspiration in the vanilla game.
To do this I was able to extract the 3D models from the video game Verdun to rework them and add new accessories and textures to match each uniform class. I was inspired by vintage pictures to match each class with a uniform or with accessories that were really used by the poilus in the trenches.
This project was an opportunity for me to improve my experience in Unreal Engine by reproducing the material tree of the vanilla game which is not exportable among the sources and which I had to reinterpret.
I already imagine a next mod to touch up some animations that I find a bit “rigid” for some and it will be the occasion to try a new point of Unreal Engine that I haven’t explored yet.