Oh Sheep!: Baaaa

Game developed within a group of students as part of the last year project during my video game design studies at ETPA in Rennes (France).

Arcade game set in a fantasy and colorful universe. The player takes on the role of Placidie, young woman teleported in a crazy place where returning to her family will be her sole purpose.

My job on this project :

Game designer

As main game designer, my job was to ensure to get the best game feel in the game, conceptualize mechanics and to assure consistency between the different mechanics without loosing sights of the principal inspirations.

At first, the game was supposed to be linear, 3D platformer and more narrative centered. But as we proceed through development, we’ve been informed that the funnier in the game according to the time of development we had was to focus on the fighting part. So we made the choice to make an arena game where the player has one main goal (mostly eliminate the foes) and various secondary objectives.

Level designer

As well as being game designer, I was main level designer. My job was to create arenas according to the experience and the type of the game. Furthermore I had to make sure that the difficulty of the game was related to our target audience.

The goal was to make arena levels where the player have some platformer situations. Due to technical problems we couldn’t make close corridors, so we had to mostly create open arenas.

First, with all the team, we agreed for the dimensions of the world and characters. Then with the others GD we worked on the distances between obstacles, the speed of the character and the jump height and height.

I work best with a clear visual of what the level « could be « . So for each level I created, I always started by creating an environment with the « Land Tool ». I just listed before doing anything all the things the levels needed/focused on.

So I’ve create each arena one by one. Starting with the tutorial.

To explain the procedure, I listed all the mechanics in the game and I ordered them by importance. (From How to move / Turn the camera to what’s the collectibles for the secondary objectives). Then I started, as said before, with the shape and how it could turned out. Keeping in mind what each mechanic must have in order to be learned. (Ex : How to move and turn the camera generally goes to other moving mechanics, such as the jump. That’s why, at the start I created some high steps where the player must jump).

Once the shape of the level and all main objects fit on it. I sent it to the environnement artist.

I replaced the map, and played on it. With more or less the final feeling of what could it be once finished. Sometimes test needed to resend the map to tweaks some shape or the size of some parts. And as the tutorial is something which need great precision and the clearest path possible, it was a lot of playtest with non familiar player. People who weren’t aware of the development or the mechanics.

For some levels, the design needed to be more accurate. That’s why for the most narrowest level, we worked it a bit differently. In addition to the shape of the level, I’ve sent an image with the size of each zones.

With few adjustments done during the process, the levels finally looked like we wanted.

I also be part of the testing phase. Thanks of the dozen of results, we were able to correct bugs, performance issues and more.

For more information and / or to try the game, feel free to go to the « Oh Sheep!: Baaaa«  itch.io page or even better on the Steam page !

Softwares i used :

• Unity
• GitHub
• Blender

Credits :

Joseph RONZIER – Project Manager | Animation Artist
Elvis GUERNION – Narrative Designer | Game Designer | Sound Programmer
Ugo TABONE – UI Artist
Kévin NABOT – 3D Character Artist | Art Director | Texture Artist | UI Programmer | Game designer
Mathieu CHAFFRE – Main Programmer | VFX Artist
Antoine RENOU – 3D Environnement Artist | Texture Artist

Thanks to the supervision of the teaching staff of ETPA in Rennes.