Pirate Academy | 2021( 3 months )
Game Designer | Programmer | UI Designer
Theme
WarioWare | Pirate
Pitch
Unity | Gitkraken | 42 people
In Pirate Academy you'll become the leader of a crew of 5 students who are trying to obtain their pirate degree. You will travel from island to island to defeat Black Passe- Câle. But take care, each of your trip is filled with mini games!
01.
Context
During my third year at rubika supinfogame, we had to create a warioware game as a team of 42 people. Each of us had to create a mini game lasting 8 seconds. At the same time, a special team was making and designing the macro game. At the end all our mini games were then put together on this macro game.
02.
My work
A.
Creating a mini Game
At the beginning of the project, I had to create, program and do all the graphic design for a mini game. I’ve chosen to make a mini game based on memory, because there were a lot of other mini games that based their challenges on haptics. And I think that variety is something important for a WarioWare. So the idea was simple : the player has 2 seconds to memorise the ingredients of a burger. And then reassemble the burger with the right ingredients one by one.
Then, I programmed the game and let some people test it to gain feedback. I’ve quickly realized that people were struggling to press the right button when they had to choose the right ingredient. They would almost always look at the controller to see where the position of the button was. Since the mini game had to last for 8 seconds, this was a huge loss of time. So I made some user interface researches so that this would be easier. I also had to make some balancing on the number of ingredients people had to memorise.
I also made all the graphics for the mini game. It wasn’t really easy, because I needed each ingredient to be recognizable, and they had to be enough different between each other, so that the player won’t forget them.
During the production of this mini game, I was related to a manager who was planning my tasks on a sprint basis. Each sprint lasted one week. At the end of the sprint we would check if my tasks were made, and plan my tasks for the next sprint.
A.
Helping on the macro game
I finished my mini game after nearly a month, and I started to help the team that was in charge of creating the big game that would contain all our games. The graphic team of the macro game needed help, so I mostly produced graphics assets. I mainly worked on the user interface, for example, I drew gauges so that the player would understand easily how many mini games he did in the series of mini games he was doing…
On that part of the project, I worked a lot more with the team, to create efficient UI by making different propositions .
Some of the graphics assets I made :
03.
Conclusion
I don’t consider myself as a Game artist or a UI artist, and I know that it’s not what I want to do. But working on it, helped me to understand more about it, and I think it was beneficial to me, so that I can better understand game artist's problems and so communicate with them better. Also, I never had user interface problems, and as a game designer, it helped me to create and think about more affordable design. Finally, it was really interesting to work in such a big team, and see how incredible the outcome of the game was with a team of this size, in just 3 months.
Other members of the team :
All the 2020 game designer class at Rubika Supinfogame