Studies Over...Next !

It’s been a while since my last post 3 days before the « P-day ».
I should have posted my feedbacks about our last day at ENJMIN’s and our final presentation in front of professionals from various industry field, long time ago.
And overall about our second year project here at ENJMIN, before starting my internship, but I’ve been a little busy… and I don’t want to write a postmortem, on what went wright or wrong (a lot of things goes wrong ^^ and finished right) about Alliance.

I didn’t post anything, mostly because I moved from Angoulême to Annecy, and it takes me some time to be fully operational. Due to my house moving, I didn’t have an internet connection anymore for about a month, and I didn’t write anything at work…

Now I’m set at Annecy, a city on the French border, near Switzerland. A city of southern France in the Alps on Lake Annecy east-northeast of Lyon. It is a popular resort and tourist center, but I’m not there for tourist purposes, but I will return about it later, in my next thread.

Now about our final presentation, it was a great – short – full of stress day, but it was also very pleasant to meet people from and around the video game industry, and be a part of the excitement of the day. We were « all » overworked during the last month to be completely (exhausted) ready for the show. Before starting about the keynotes, I should talk about the five different projects we (teams) have to present during this day, and how do we HAVE to do it.


• What we have to do :

The presentation goes on for about 1 hour. The room is full of professional people, among them there was our jury and the rest was all the students from ENJMIN, or art schools from Angouleme. Some journalists from AFP, Charente Libre and Sud Ouest were here to assist and report the event. After each keynote, a Q&A session begins between the jury and the students, more like an informal conversation. They were here to highlights points about our presentation and give a « concrete » feedback on our work. They also give us a notation, which is our last one.


• Five Student’s Projects :

Alliance
A strategy game made for everyone, and when I say everyone, it’s really easy to play. Most of the complex aspects of a strategy game were simplified or automated. (Which is (was) also my second year project).

EverFall
An action free-falling adventure game in a huge post-apocalyptic world. Based on a mysterious scenario about ancient tribes.

Tempus Fugit
This one was about time travelling and playing with its different « time clones » to complete the level by killing everyone. A « Time Cop » conspiracy which offers availability to the player to be part of a Film Noir adventure.

Sound Cities
Music to sooth the soul, but SC is a very punchy and exhausting DJ – strategy game. Its played with a Bitmania turntable.

MU
Also an action-adventure game, full 3D, where the character is linked to a massive structure with a parasite. He has to cure the place, before getting out of it, using plateform skills and his abalitie to move gigantic piece of structure.


• Presentation / Keynote :

Our presentation just went right, GREEN [Mr Dallas] ! In my opinion, it was the best one of this day. It was also the first of the day, so we were a lot less stressed after having finished that part of the exercice.
Thanks to DJP, who did a great (graphist) work using Keynote on his mac, to make an active presentation to summarize the core message and in the same time Alexandre (my co-GD) which was the only game designer who fully did the presentation in english. Completely understandable. And he did well !

Alliance
Our game was Alliance, a simple strategy game, which could have been released for XBLA, PSN and maybe Iphone/DS.

The world of Alliance is based on a blend of a medieval futuristic ecologic design, using the Sun and sunbeam as our only ressource. Ressources gives power to produce Units and make decisions on the map.
Players have to control different points on the map, build with hexagones pieces as the image below show them.

Basically it’s a conquer territory game, with fighting squads. To conquer a point you have to move your squad to the point, and fight the opponent if he wants to take it from you or take it back. Squads are created from grouping Units from 1 to 9 in it, you can actually mix them as you want to, or make a homogeneous squad with the same unit. From the Units side, we created for Alliance, three kinds of characters :

The Soldier // The Mage // The Tank

The following character use a non-transitive relation. In a non-transitive game the fact is that strategy A is preferred over strategy B, and strategy B is preferred over strategy C. In our case, it means that :

The Soldier beats The Mage
The Mage beats The Tank
The Tank beats The Soldier

Which according to everyone, is very simple.

There are three colours, meaning three different AI behaviours, which affect the unit in battle.

Designed behaviours :
Berserk : Go to the fight without taking care of the ennemy force.
Assist : Analyse who is the most weakest ennemy in battle to help an ally.
Selfcare : 
 Unit keeps fighting until his life point are under the oponent life points level

Controlling Units is childish, the player decides when he launches his Units, regarding the general behaviour of his opponent.

ALLIANCE
Build. Fight. Conquer.

The Team
Producer : Jean-Philippe Durand
Game Designer : Ariel Taieb // Alexandre Wyns
Programmer : Alexis Bauchus // Laurent Guerri
Sound Designer : Marie-Emilie Brun
Graphist : Etienne Rehault // Anne-Lise Loubière // Carlos Junior Ramirez
Ergonomics : Boris Solinski

It's Over ...humm almost !

Hi,
My name is Ariel Taieb, I am a student in his second and last year in Game Design at ENJMIN which stands for "Ecole Nationale des Jeux et Medias Interactifs Numeriques" (The Graduate School of games and interactive media) it's the only such institution in Europe, located in Angouleme in France.
ENJMIN is a two year program delivering a master's degree at graduation in six specialties needed in the game development industry, such as, Game Design, Project Management, Programming, Visual Design, Sound Design and Ergonomics.

Only a selected few are accepted in this program, 50 per year. There is a During the first year, we are put into groups of four to six people, for 1 full month for a Student Project :

EPITAPHE
One of my student project at the ENJMIN. The game demo was about using your in-game death to progress.
«how death of the player can lead to victory in a video game»
The game was made using the open source OGRE 3D graphic engine and within 1 months. I have done the
game and level design and also the story part.


More infos there:
You can download the game

DUNYA
My second student project at the ENJMIN. The game demo was about using a tangible audio and visual
interface to make batlle with sound.The project is based on the reacTVIsion software for fiducial tracking and Pure Data for sound synthesis.

Made within a team of 6 people, I have worked on the game concept.
This is more like an RTS experiment about tangible visual and audio.
This project won the SACD(french writer guild) and NX Publishing best game student price in june 2008, who allowed us to attend the Siggraph'08 in Los Angeles, CA

More infos there (French)



The second year of the degree, we work in teams of nine to eleven students drawn from the different specialties taught at the school; we spend six months working on a real pre-production of a game or interactive media that we present in front of a jury of professionals at the end of the year.

Indeed, during this year, I'm working on a new project, called Alliance.

ALLIANCE
Alliance is a turn based strategy game, which allow players to customize squads he will produce. All the units are controlled by AI behaviours on the day phase for the fight, while the creation and the movement of each squad is made during the night phase.

At the end of the final year, each student must intern for the duration of at least six months a professional development team. Which brings me to my original sentence title, it's almost over, the presentation day is almost here.

Tomorow is the FINAL DAY.