With my friend Sébastien Violier, we are working in our spare time on a game that we temporarily called “TSQ”.
Early prototyping
TSQ has 3 core pillars: · It’s a Boss fight game (Similar to Fury in its approach) · It’s a tactical game played on a chessboard. (Eg: Disgaea, Dofus, Wakfu, Alchemy Stars) · It’s a rogue lite (Similar to Slay the spire in its approach)
Regarding the 3C: · Camera and Controller would be similar to Alchemy stars · Character is unique and belong to our game.
Concepts: · At the start of a run, the players can choose between a different type of character class, leading to specific gameplay. · The players can choose a Boss to defeat between a proposition of 3 bosses. · All bosses have their own patterns, strengths & weaknesses. · They can pre-visualize the rewards they would get if they defeat successfully the boss in question. · A boss defeated will never appear again in the proposition of 3 until the end of the run. · Once every 3 bosses defeated, All the bosses level up of one “stage”: they are given stronger patterns & characteristics. · There are 10 Bosses and therefore each of them have 4 different “stages”. · The rewards are either level up of their class abilities OR runes that are acting like modifiers, adding characters or abilities characteristics.
User Experience: · The players will constantly have choice to do: · What class do they want to play with? (Ranged, Melee, Aggressive, Defensive, etc.) · Which Boss do they want to defeat first? · Which rewards do they want to accomplish their build order? · On which of their spell are there putting their rewards? (Runes or Level up)
Working on a tooltip that automatically generate level up & Runes texts
As we are both already working, the project takes its time, but we are really glad to work on it 🙂
For confidentiality reasons, I don’t have any documents to share, but here is a bunch of games I have been working on during my 1 year at Ubisoft Paris.
As a Junior User Researcher, my job was to do User test based on the questions asked by the developers. Depending on the questions asked, we were using various methods such as Observation, Survey, Interviews, etc. in order to make reports of the issues that had been encountered by the players throughout the test session (Bugs excluded).
Belly is an organic and dark Shoot Them Up. You have to survive by sending back what the enemies shoot to you, unfortunatly, your fate seems to be scelled…
You can find a video of Markiplier who plays it here :
Before starting to explain the tool in itself, let me introduce you the context in which I created it. As my master’s degree second year project started, I was asking myself: “How could I introduce our users in the loop of production while we don’t have a game yet?”. After some reflexions, I remembered a Talk by Emmanuelle Marévéry I had heard at Game UX Summit 2019. It was relating to how the text mining could actually tells a lot about what users say about a game. I decided to dig this topic further and I started to work on that. I had no affinity at all with python ans therefore, I decided to use R to create the tool. I started to search for a way to get all the reviews available on Steam. I found the Steam API which is actually quite bad when it comes to request the reviews: I successfully get them, but there were something like 1% of them. Apparently the API doesn’t keep all the reviews, stuck there, I had to find another way. I started to dig deeping the webscraping in R. I was using Rvest but unfortunatly for me, the way that Steam display the reviews got me stuck again. The endless loading which actualize each time we go to the bottom of the page forestalled me to get them once again. But I’m not a quitter. l asked help to a collegue that explained to me how to get all the requesting URLs endlessly. A good hundred of hours later, I had them all, ready to text mine everything.
Histogram
First of all, I wanted that my team could access to the top twenty words most used throughout all the reviews. Therefore they could see what were the hotspots of our concurrents even though they couldn’t know why words were used. The following analyse will be about Hyper Light Drifter, as it has been tag like a game that inspire our game.
Global Reviews
After that, I decided to apply the same process but before, I filtered good and bad reviews so it would give a valence to the top twenty words most used. As you can see, the tool gives the number of reviews used to do the top twenty. It brings some relativeness to the valence.
Recommended Reviews
Not Recommended Reviews
Wordcloud
In order to be useful and understandable to my team, I use visual graphics like wordclouds to represent the occurency of the words. As I did earlier, I splitted my wordclouds in 3 parts, global/ recommended / not recommended reviews and here they are:
Global Reviews
Recommended Reviews
Not Recommended Reviews
As you could have guessed, the colour and size of the words are displayed according to their occurency.
Bi-grams Graphic
Now that we had a good vision of the big trends concerning Hyper Light Drifter, I wanted to go further and give sens to these trends. I managed to do a graph of Bi-grams (it basically scans all the reviews and returns the most used couple of words). For the example, I picked a global graph but I divided them into 3 part in the tool: global / recommended / not recommended reviews and for each of them, the .pdf is split in 3 layers to enhance the visualization (from the highest occurency to the lowest).
The tool create a directory and put the files inside it, I have nothing to do but to change the Steam link in the code. The way Steam website is coded makes the tool break sometimes. It can’t gather all the reviews but it often gather at least more than 5k reviews which is already a good number. The goal of this tool is to give an effortless overall reviews of what has been said about games and allowing to find potential hot-spot to focus on in further qualitative researches.
To conclude, you can download and have an eye on the files of Hyper Light Drifter here:
As you open your eyes, your soul start to pulse in rhythm with your world. You are going to start a singular journey…
In Detail
Synchronicles is my last year student project at ENJMIN. I did word mining, user tests and ux design during the production. In the first steps I’ve realized benchmarks on signs and feedback because the game is a mix between rhythm game and metroid game which is a kind of unexpected mix. I had to do a good scanning on what had been done in the industry previously in order to be ready to provide to my team the best solutions.
I asked to plan user tests as soon as we could and doing them on weekly basis so we could see what was working or not. We had troubles to find a good control scheme and had to do back and forth in order to get the best solution. However I’m still not convinced by the current one. Unfortunately the border with game design was too close for me to have an impact on it. The best solution is to give players the possibility to rebind everything but due to production allowed time, we had to impose a control scheme.
Concerning the UX Design part, I did a wire frame on Figma in order to blueprint the menu navigation that finally was not produced due to task priorisation. I produced documents regarding signs and feedback and it was a challenging part knowing that if players did not get proper signs and feedback, they would not be able to move forward in the game. I was also there to support the team in the little choice about color, forms, sounds, metronome design and so on.
I had a lot of talks with my team 1 on 1 in order to clarify things that had been returned by players during tests and confront the current design to the problem we met so we could keep a good red wire.
I really liked to be part of this team and project, it ended my studies in the best way possible and in that, I’m very thankful to my team.
Aurore travel by train when she starts to daydream … Escaping through the window, she enters her inner world in which she can resize elements. Aurore is a peaceful ballad throughout a young mind. The game has received the “Excellence in Art” award in the “Rookie division” of the Busan Indie Connect Festival.
As an UX Designer on Aurore, I mostly did User Research because I was Game & UX Designer on Achromatic at this period, which was already a consequent charge of work. I wasn’t in the team at first because we had a constraint regarding the size of the team, it was something imposed by the school. I was a volunteer on the project. I did very appreciate to work with the Aurore team because all the member paid a lot of attention to what I had to say. From the time we had a prototype to the end of the development, I did user tests every week. I usually did the user tests by the end of the week and I worked in a way they could have the full report on Monday, so they could adjust their production regarding what had been said in the report. I maintained this process for the last 4 weeks of production, knowing that we developed the game in 2 months and 2 weeks.
A dark mood, a jazzy atmosphere, welcome to Achromatic. It is game that is a tribute to Film Noir cinema genre with the particularity to be multi-platform. You play with a notebook printable and the game. Explore both of the notebook and the game to find the culprit! Achromatic received the “Jury’s favorite” award at Hits Playtime.
Achromatic was my main project in team during my first year of master’s degree. I did a good part of the Game Design and the whole UX Design of it. For the game design part, I did most of the level design and most of the puzzles you have to solve to find the culprit. I was less into the narrative part of it. It was a rich experience to develop the game with the school constraints that we had that were: realizing a 10 minutes game in 2 months and 2 weeks of development. This game has the particularity to be played on two different platforms simultaneously, which are: a computer and a printable notebook. We put a lot of efforts in it, and I am very proud of what we finally had.
Dorian Souc 