French interview

Voodoo Zombie is a rail shooter on iPhone. You hunt the living dead and only your speed will save your brain.

A unique technique on iPhone allows zombies to have realistic reactions under your shots.

At last, thanks to another great innovation on iPhone you will become a fierce hunter with the Power slicer, an ultimate weapon which slices arms, legs and bodies !

Gore lovers will have a plate full !

The second step in prototyping : trying the gameplay.

We include mixing tests between character animations and the ragdoll setup. The purpose is to have probable movements, the nearest of animations made in Cheetah3D (inverse kinematics), on reacting models to physics and to impacts thanks to the ragdoll in Unity.
There are first graphic elements for buildings. The zombie will be completely remade.

At last, we can use one of musics created by Johan Holmström, who we recommend to all producers.

We are very proud to announce CNC offered us a subsidy to create a model of a new game : MrElements.
We’ll give news about it.
Thank you to CNC !

- Poème en alexandrin -

Qu’il est bon de shooter du zombie dans la ville.
Mais morts-vivants, qu’il est ardu de vous trouver !
Alors sur iPhone, agitons nos doigts agiles
et que s’apaise enfin notre instinct de boucher.

Déchiquetons, broyons et shootons avec grâce
Les polygones morbides des citrouilles abjectes,
Des chauve-souris et de tous ces monstres pugnaces.
Faisons goûter notre colère à ces insectes !

Gamepulp veut vous aider à cette noble quête,
Par le miracle des ragdolls, des meshes détruites,
Vous pourrez découper bras, jambes et têtes.
Regardez, braves gens, les vidéos qui font suite.

(continue reading…)

Not very surprisingly, many speakers talked about the thatgamecompany’s game : Flower as a good example of the future of gaming in terms of emotions, target audience, and design in general. So I expected a lot about this conference… and wasn’t disapointed.

Kellee Santiago, game designer on the project, gave us a look at the complete design process. All through this process, they kept in mind the feelings (peace, love) they wanted to give through the game. This simple idea allow them to define clear  gameplay mechanics following this guide. But I think the most interesting (for me) thing was that with 5 gameplay mechanics defined they took months (15 exactly) to playtest it (at the frequency of 2 playtests per week and 1 at the end). One by one, prototyping the mechanics with Flash or other.
I think this working method reduce considerably the mistakes in the production… This is maybe an exception in the industry to have so much time prototyping but it clearly gave strong basis to the production itself. In facts, Flower was made in 2 years that is to say only 8 months of production !

Next to this conference, “Designing women” starring Kellee Santiago and other women game designers was more of a debate.  Not only on women in video games or as gamers but also on diversity in the industry. They really want to give a different point of view and feelings in the design concept and I totally agree with them that it is essential and enthousiastic !

As gamers, it appears that women and girls (because researches focus on young girls games) don’t learn to play the same way as boys. When a boy directly rush an unknown game and learn from his mistakes, girls tends to observe first how the game works before starting to play (obviously it’s not a law which is confirmed each time). You may suppose that it is not the only difference between boy and girl gamers.
I think that our work as game designer must take into account its established fact… You know that currently 40% of all gamers are female ?
And the same parallel can be made with the age of the players whhich do not cease to increase.

You may suspect what it remains to be made ? To diversify !