ABOUT ME

Overview of my professional profile, specialities, experience and values.

• More

STUDIES AND INTERNSHIP

A palette of games produced during my 5-year formation at Piktura.
From small-scale projects to 1 year productions in varied teams as well as two Internships.

• More

SOLO PROJECTS

Numerous experiments and game genres, with a focus on original gameplay and/or atmospheres.

• More

game jams

Many participations to Game Jams, including Ludum Dares, Global Game Jams, and the first edition of the Franco-Belga Game Jam.

• More

Gameplay programming

3D realtime Gameplay is at the forefront of what I enjoy making as a developer.
I specialize in detailed character controllers and strong game feel, and especially love making unique and innovative ones.

CEPHALOPHORIA - End of studies project

Wrestle me a Selfie - Solo project

PROTOTYPING

Very adamant aboout cooperation and understanding between sectors, I constantly try to stay flexible between different facets of game developement, which in turn makes me especially efficient at prototyping and proof of concepts.I firmly believe that good communication is essential to making good games.

Physics & ragdolling

I have a pronounced fixation on active ragdolls (octodad, humans fall flat, etc) and tend to work a lot with them.I feel like there is still a lot of untapped potential on ragdoll physics, especially when it comes to more "serious" toned games.

True Entropy - Solo project

Shepherd - Solo project (WIP)

procedural & animation

With how much I love to work with 3D gameplay, I would be none the wiser if I knew nothing about animation.Be it procedural micro-details and interactions to hand-made animation and rigging, it is as much of a hobby as it is a part of what I regularly work on in games.

• RETURN TO MAIN

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

TRUE ENTROPY

point & click

Lost, confused, oddly déjà vu.
Find out the truth of your presence, of your surroundings, break free from whatever the hell you woke up in.

• More

DOOMER

story-driven / fast fps

-WIP-
A surrealist new wave post-punk game about a lonely and desperate individual who found a gun in his bathroom.

• More

WRESTLE ME A SELFIE

beat em' all

A flashy and punchy mess of a game, boasting a fully ragdolled player and enemies, dramatic slowdowns and violent executions.

• More

THE HOPE FRIGATE MASSACRE

survival horror

A dismemberment-focused survival horror shooter set on a gigantic cruise boat traveil to world's end.-Project fate unkown-

• More

BUTLER GUILLOTINE

puzzle / atmosphere

Wander the endless halls of an impossible hotel, do not fall asleep.

• More

RUNNER PROTOTYPE

runner

Prototype based on metro cross made in 8 hours.-Project fate unkown-

• More

• RETURN TO MAIN

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

CEPHALOPHORIA

ATMOSPHERIC - End of studies project

An experimental first-person game about a severed head controlling headless bodies inside a massive life-giving deity at its life's end.

Role(s) : Creative director, Game Programmer and Designer

• More

SPARROW BAY

RESIDENT EVIL LIKE - INTERNSHIP

A resident evil-like survival horror set in the remote camp of Sparrow Bay, where something otherworldly is brewing under everyone's nose.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

drilled

HORROR/VR - 1 month student jam - showcased at the pix 2023

You wake up in a dirty basement, pinned to an operation chair by rusty tools. Pull them out of your body, avoid attracting unwanted attention.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

ASFALIA

point & click - internship

A beautifully hand drawn point and click children's tale on emotions.

Role(s) : Gameplay Programmer

• More

TILT

pinball/ACTION - ENd of bachelor project

A 3d platformer and pinball hybrid game about wrecking a giant mech to pieces from the inside.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

• RETURN TO MAIN

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

HOUSE MAN

Beat em' all - Ludum dare 55

SUMMON furniture from your HOUSE as WEAPONS to OBLITERATE corporates trying to SEIZE your PROPERTY.YOU WANT MY HOUSE? COME GET SOME.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

OUT OF REACH

Puzzle - student jam

Play as a puppet with a single, extremely long arm. Execute simple tasks with strange controls, and get out of your own head once and for all.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

MAKE ME GIRAFFE

PVP / FIGHTING - GLOBAL GAME JAM

Wrestle your opponent out of the ring with sheer neck girth.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

Murder Museum Mausoleum

strategy - franco-belga jam

Fight your way through an underground museum in this crazy turn based strategy game.

Role(s) : Gameplay Programmer and Designer

• More

ROOTS OF HERITAGE

ADVENTURE - GLOBAL GAME JAM

Some say that a constant clucking can be heard from the depths of the terrain, locals still fear that a great danger is sealed away in there.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

PAPA ? NSFW

action / racing - student jam

An honest working father decides to run over all the corporates that have been chasing him for years. That's indeed not safe for work.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

Puncher pusher

ACTION - LUDUM DARE 51

In a world where people can't properly enter the subway,
hidden underground heroes are here to fill the transports no matter what.

Role(s) : Game Programmer and Designer

• More

• RETURN TO MAIN

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

the studio

The internship was done under the guidance of Lammakian Samsenesena, an independent Concept artist currently working as a teacher at Piktura, as well as developing independent projects.

The project

Welcome to Sparrow Bay is a gritty survival horror inspired from the likes of John Carpenter's the Thing and the Invasion of The Body Snatchers.Previously incubated at the Plaine Images, Lammakian now contiues Sparrow Bay's development independently.

First impressions

Being a big fan of survival horror, I was very excited to be able to work on such a project.
I already knew Lammakian pretty well, and trusted him wholeheartedly concerning directives and supervision.
Needless to say, I had great expectations for this intership, and was not disappointed in the slightest.

Production - Game Systems

Sparrow Bay was an extremely enriching experience for a multitude of reasons.
First and foremost, the project was undertaking a complete gameplay overhaul, migrating from a point & click adventure to a full on survival horror.
This meant that I couldn't start coding immediately, and spent a lot of time discussing ideas with Lammakian.

The task at hand was to design an original spin on OG tank controls, attractive to veterans of the genre but still accessible.
The combat system needed to suit a more dynamic gameplay than OG resident evil, with way more aggressive enemies.
Additionnaly, the project is partly powered by Adventure Creator. As such, the system needs to be adapted to it.

The solution we ended up going for was to add a skill curve on the macro part of the game rather than mechanical skill.
Tank controls feel naturally arkward to modern players (myself included), so focusing more on decision-making felt natural pretty quick.My suggestion to that newfound philosophy was a hitscan system, where you could aim upwards for headshots and downwards for stuns.
Aiming long enough without actually shooting improves focus, dealing double damage.

Note : the animations are placeholders I integrated for the sake of concreteness, and are not final in the slightest.

Note : the animations are placeholders I integrated for the sake of concreteness, and are not final in the slightest.

Now that the main question was answered, we still needed a way to fight back against highly aggressive enemies.
Tank controls meant that directional dodging was out of the question, we needed something else.I ended up making a variant of the perfect parries from sekiro and RE4 remake, putting forward the main character's rugged physique with a counter-punch that knocks enemies to the ground if timed right.

Production - DEMO LEVEL

With the player loop and a basic enemy AI done, it was time to put them into actual gameplay situations. A level would also help me polish the fixed camera system already available in adventure creator.

We talked a lot with Lammakian about level design, and what sort of test level would suit testing the most.
We eventually concluded that risking bad level design when the focus is testing a combat system was not a great idea. So we ended remaking RE4's village encounter in blocking to see how our system fared.

The level took some time to block out, but thank god we did it early on, as the cameras and pathfinding has some major issues we would've never been about to see otherwise.I'm happy to say that they are now stabilized and working.

Production - BASIC ENEMIES

Now that the player loop was mostly set in stone and that we hand a level to test everything on, it was time to complexify and refine the enemies around everything available.Lammakian's directives were very clear : These enemies are not simple zombies, they communicate and coordinate, using a divide and conquer strategies rather than mindlessly throwing themselves at the player.

One of the first ideas that came to mind was to vary enemy behaviours without having apparent "types". More aptitudes on similar enemies would naturally make them look smarter.I pushed the system further, adding a "leader" system, where one designated enemy from each group would trigger all the others with an order, and take more of a back role for the remainder of the fight.

So many aggressive enemies at once ended up being simply unfun and caused parry spamming.
As such, I ended up adding a beat-em'-all token-based system on top of the current leader system, where enemy groups would have a fixed number of "attack tokens" that regenerated over time.Enemies all pick from the token pool when trying to attack, and only those that receive one can actually attack. This limits how many enemies can attack at once, and their attack frequency.

Production - MINIBOSS

The basic enemies were done earlier than expected, so we quickly set out to make a miniboss for the gameplay section.The idea was to have our own spin on the chainsaw enemy from RE4, serving as a first big enemy and a reference at the same time.

This enemy shares many similarities to its referenced counterpart, his unique trait being a capacity to aggressively dash forward and quicky close the gap.
He will be stunned if his dash hits a wall.As per resident evil standards, his chainsaw attack is a one shot.

Now that the fight worked, I needed to find a way to isolate this enemy once he spawned. The fight would be unbearable otherwise.The solution ? Friendly fire. BEHOLD.

After some additional polish, the miniboss was ready to go and added into the demo with relative ease.Further playtesting shows that he was still too strong and up for some balancing.

end of production

As the end of the intership drawed near (sadly :c ), it was time to refine the missing systems and make a serviceable menu.The game was missing healing items and reload mechanics, which was a shame for how important they would be to the game's balancing.

• STUDIES AND INTERNSHIP

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

OBJECTIVE

For our first ever VR project, our class was divided into different groups and tasked to make either a horror or a rhythm game.
The school gave us access to an Oculus Quest 2 as well as a masterclass on VR development, and from that, we started brainstorming.

No one seemed to thrilled to make a rhythm game, so the decision was quite obvious.
Still, small VR horror games have a tendency to have that cliché ghost train feel that we really didn't want to have.
We wanted real player agency, something immersive and unique.

• STUDIES AND INTERNSHIP

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

OBJECTIVE

True Entropy was first and foremost a self-imposed challenge, to see what I would be able to individually produce in a limited time.The idea was to make a short, self-contained demo that held its own, and could be played from start to finish.

I had a pretty clear idea of what I was going for from the start :A pure 3d point & click murder mystery with fixed camera angles and a visual novel-like dialogue interface with animated close-ups of the 3d characters.

DEVELOPMENT

I'm happy to say that production went surprisingly smoothly !
I was worried that the highly animated nature of the concept would take up a ton of time,
but ended up finding a nice solution :

The charaters would all be wooden puppets, used as active ragdolls within the game.Their appearance matched the ballroom-esque aesthetic quite well, and the active ragdolls made up for the micro-details I would never have had the time to animate.

The hardest part of the game by far was the writing. I had no pre-made dialogue system on hand, and had to make something functional as fast as possible.
I also realised quite late how short a 20 minute runtime really was for storytelling, and had to swap the whole narrative from a layered murder-mystery to a way more personal story.

post-mortem

In all, this project was a great success. It forced me to really adapt the game to its short play time both narratively and rhythmically.
From a technical standpoint, I'm happy to say that it was mostly smooth sailing (even though I somehow completely forgot how to make double clicks work, happens I guess-).

My biggest win was most certainly that every tester was able to actually finish the game.
The progression requires a lot of back and forth, and some clues were pretty subtle.
The story was pretty much understood by everyone, which was great too !

• RETURN TO SOLO PROJECTS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

OBJECTIVE

Wrestle me a Selfie was a technical challenge for myself, to see how far I could push active ragdolls outside of their genre (fall guys, octodad, etc.).
And what better type of game than a good old beat em' all.

The contradiction between the volatile and unpredicable behaviour of the ragdolls and the precise moves and inputs needed to make beat em' all combat work looked very interesting to me.
The objective for the project was pretty clear : simply try my best to make it actually work.

DEVELOPMENT - THE DISCOVERY

What a ride.
I've been on and off this project constantly throughout the last year and a half, and am still planning to return to it in the new future.
The very onorthodox nature of the concept has lead my to non-stop blockages and breakthroughs.

The first big part of development was purely experimental, I wanted to find a way to make an active ragdoll stand up and walk by itself, no constraints or code, simply animating it would make it walk.And I'm happy to say that I eventually pulled it off. Literally screamed victory in front of a model walking.

Now that what I thought was the "hard" part done, I started adding attacks and enemies to, you know, actually make a game.I soon realized how much the intricate balance of my wrestler's walk was absolutely smashed to bits by every interaction I added, and would require constant re-balancing again and again.

I managed to scrape by and make a functionnal prototype, and needless to say I was glad that it worked, even if it barely did.Combat felt sluggish and unresponsive, everything was "floaty" and a bit off. It's cool that it existed, but that demo was far from a good game.
Things had to change.

DEVELOPMENT - REVENGEANCE

Things did end up changing. After an 8 month break. I deemed that I was maybe not good enough at the time, game feel and programming wise to actually pull off what I was trying to do, and focused for a while on other, simpler projects.

First of all, the game was up for a relooking.
I had to finally let go of that old model of mine, and actually take the time to make a good model (thank you Apolline for the help in character design by the way-).I also took the time to polish most of the animations I had, and clean up the absolute mess in my code. Coming back to an almost one year old code is always so weird.

Then, it was time for the meat of the subject.
I made an actual ragdoll editor, with ways to balance them quicker and modify them in real time with a few methods.On top of that was a whole new AI iteration, and advanced game time manipulation to make up for the ragdolls' inherent softness.

POST-MORTEM (KINDA)

A month of game feel and gameplay overhaul later, I was able to produce a second demo.The game was now actually nice to control and satisfying, the ragdolls physics adding to the strength of the impacts, rather than detracting from it.

I haven't gone back to the project as of yet, but when I will, I'm happy to say that it will be to add levels, attacks and enemy types, rather than trying to salvage a buggy mess.I've been experimenting with a few special moves, but nothing concrete has come out as of yet !

• RETURN TO SOLO PROJECTS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

OBJECTIVE

The Hope Frigate Massacre is the continuation of a in the works ragdoll editor. I realized that it was very similar to a dismemberment system, with the possibility to still animate the dismembered limbs.
I wanted to make something very violent, but precise in its distribution of pain.

I wanted to make the gameplay revolve entirely around dismemberment, a dead space ++The player and enemies would follow the same rules : no HP, no heals. They die when completely dismembered, can steal limbs from eachother and reassemble themselves.

DEVELOPMENT

Development went suprisingly well! I had been working on Wrestle Me a Selfie for a while now, and had already gotten the hang of this style of active ragdolls.
Soon enough, I was able to make a functionnal combat system.

Shots felt good and the feedback on the enemies worked well. I loved the idea of the enemies spraying blood at each place they got hit.
However, the combat didn't feel rewarding or "that" unique, it still boiled down to a third person survival horror where you shoot things.

I still polished the mechanics I had, and made a stronger enemy type. While it looked cool and felt good to fight, it was hard to justify the use of ragdolls in the game loop, it was "different" for sure, but didn't bring much to the table.
I realised that have this much detail in a game with ranged attacks really didn't make a whole lot of sense, and deemed the experiment a fail.

POST-MORTEM

The Hope Frigate Massacre was an interesting experience.
Even if it didn't work too great as a full on game, I was able to add a functional dismemberment system on top of my already existing active ragdoll system.
I honestly could've pushed the game further to get a demo out, but eventually decided against it.

I wanted to eventually bring its AI and disememberment to another type of game, one that would revolve entirely around melee attacks, and see where that leads me.
I'm perfectly content with leaving The Hope Frigate Massare in its own little pocket dimension, as an unfinished demo waiting to be used again.

• RETURN TO SOLO PROJECTS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

OBJECTIVE

Butler Guillotine was the first full-scale project I've worked on, with the simple objective of trying to make a unique and playable experience.
It was the first time I tried creating a project based on fuzzy mental images I had of it.

This was an absolutely eye-opening experience on a process that I loved and keep doing even today.
Needless to say, this little project is still very close to my heart, and I'll probably revisit it sometime in the near future.

DEVELOPMENT

Butler Guillotine's development was quite slow-paced. I had never worked on a project this size before, and took a long time to get the technical parts down.
Whether it was the handling of the fixed cameras (especially the transitions) or the very detailed and slow-paced movement, I learned most of it on the fly.

A big part of development went into research concerning the atmosphere, and pacing in general. The generally slow movement could very easily become unbearable, and a game like this without a special atmosphere would have no point in existing.

Even if it isn't my "job" per se, I wanted to push the visual part of the project quite a bit, especially in terms of composition, lighting and animations.
I was convinced that these elements were necessary to convey the project's artistic intention as well as accompany everything it was trying to be.

POST-MORTEM

In all, Butler Guillotine has its issues. It however was, and still is one of my most important projects to date, as it kickstarted my reflexion on how I view game development, and what types of creations I strive for.

• RETURN TO SOLO PROJECTS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

With such a short development time, I really don't have that much to say. Still, this was one of the times where a prototype just "clicked", and I felt like it worked extremely well already.
I'm planning on eventually pushing it into PoC/Demo territory, with more levels, enemies, and a semblance of a story.

I am however, really satisfied with the quality of the work I was able to do in 8 hours. The animations are smooth and the game loop is completely stable.The demo level has its issues, but can actually be ran in 1/3 of its estimated runtime with the right moves, so that's cool too !

• RETURN TO SOLO PROJECTS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

• RETURN TO GAME JAMS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

Out of Reach is a game made during a 2-day student jam where all student levels from second year to fifth year are mixed together into random teams.
We talked for a while about how more serious games tend to be difficult to pull off in game jams.

So what better idea than doing just that ?We set out to make an abstract narrative puzzle game about an unconscious patient trying to wake up. What a great and simple idea.

And guess what ? We actually somehow pulled it off.Out of Reach has a nice runtime, a complete storyline, original music and unique gameplay.
Audio design is on point, and everyone did a great job in making this project come to life.The world is indeed full of nice surprises and hard work. Especially hard work. Good job guys.

• RETURN TO GAME JAMS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

• RETURN TO GAME JAMS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

• RETURN TO GAME JAMS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn

• RETURN TO GAME JAMS

CONTACT - PROFILES

• CV
• Email
• Itch.io
• LinkedIn