This is a serious game I had to make for my bachelor final project. As I take this class during the summer session, we were only two on this project and had to make a whole game in one month. The subject was given by our teacher, but they just gave us a general idea of what the game was supposed to be about. So we also had to make a design document before starting to create the game and to have it validated by our teacher. That's for the little story.

Let's talk now about the game itself. Initially we wanted  to make a 3D game but our teachers wanted something more simple. So even if we made a game design document by ourself, it was oriented by the will of our teachers. 

The game was part of a huge research project about the Alzheimer disease our teachers were working on. The purpose of the game was to make a person suffering from this disease exercise his brain to be able to do his daily activities. It was thought as a parameterizable game a clinician would specifically configure for a patient according to his problems.

An activity in our case is a very generic term which definition is something like "A group of actions that has to be made in a specific order to reach a goal". For example, we can imagine an activity like "eat spaghetti" composed by the actions: "take the boiler", "fill it with water", "turn on the hotplate", "wait for the water to boil", "open the spaghetti box and put them in the boiler", "garbage the box", "prepare the table",... (I won't learn you how to cook and eat spaghetti, I'm sure you already get my point).

It was my first experience making a serious game. Besides, we must consider points that you never had to, due to our specific targeted client. Indeed, we designed our game following an article [1] from one of our teacher giving advices to make your game playable by our targeted client. For example, the general color of the game must be bright, each element must be clearly identifiable, this can be made by having visible border to delimit objects. Besides, GUI must be easy to understand especially as our game was for Androîd.

I made an XML activity loader. A clinician can put a description of an activity on an XML file, including all actions the patient has to do plus error-actions the clinician wants the patient to avoid. When the XML is loaded on the game, it creates a puzzle where the tiles are the actions. The user has to put the tiles on the grid in the right order which will form a word. When he thinks he completed the board, he press the validation button to see his score.

When the player moves a tile, the description of the corresponding action appears. On the tile is a letter, that will form a word if the player place correctly the tiles on the grid. The player can also double-click on the tile to play a video that shows the corresponding action.

The player score was an important part of the developpement, how can we have a meaningful score that will encourage the user but also be useful for the clinician. So I implemented a score based on the time the user takes to complete the board, and on different types of mistakes he made. All scores a registered in a file the clinician can read to analyse his patient progress.

Like I said before, when the grid is completed, it forms a word. This words are titles of crosswords the player unlocks and are accessible in the bonus menu through the main menu. So I also made a crosswords generator and a crosswords game. These parts took a large part of my time.

[1] - Developing Serious Games Specifically Adapted to People Suffering from Alzheimer. Bouchard, Bruno, et al., et al. [ed.] Springer. Bremen : s.n., 2012. SGDA 2012. Vol. 7528.

Each year Ubisoft Montreal proposes a game competition named the Academia Game Lab Competition invloving student teams to make a 3D game. I've got the privilege to participate to this competition with my team of students coming from the CentreNAD and the UQAC where I used to be.

Our project, Lacerta, is a 3D sidescroller, in a spacestation environment, where the player controls a character who has powerfull and very special powers: she can create small black holes and white holes.

• Game: Lacerta
  
• Type: 3D Sidescroller
  
• Environment: Space
  
• Team: Remi Comtois, Vincent Laforest, Michaël Calixte Papineau, Simon Philippe, Louis-Philippe Laporte, Adam Lacharité, Alexandre Robert, Raphaël Dalpé, Zabdiel Marin, Jean Meyblum
  
• Project: Academia Game Lab 2013
  
• Engine: UDK
• Platform: Windows
• Production Time: 3 months
• Awards: 4 nominations, and the Animation award

In this game, life and energy of the main character is the same thing. To create white or black holes, the character uses its own vital life. She can't use more than 2/3 of her life to be spend for creating holes. If she try to, she won't die but it will destroy the previous holes she created to create the new one. If she takes damages, before her personal life starts to decrease, it's her holes that will first automaticaly disappear and she will get back energy of the holes. When she's out of combat since a certain period of time, she automatically regain her life. 

Her first power is to create black and white holes depending of left or right mouse click.

• Black Hole: It creates a little black hole in her sight of sight that will attract all moveable objects that are in its range, even enemies or the player itself.
  
• White Hole: The same as black hole but repulse everything around it !
  

When she progress in the game she gain more skills:

• Shield: clicking with the white hole mouse button on her will create a temporary shield around her that will protect her from everything.
• Bigger Holes: Simply bigger and more powerful white and black holes.

As she can create holes even behind her and in every direction, the animation team made lots of different animations of her arm for each direction where she creates a hole. My job here was to look in the direction where the hole was created and then to use and play the correct animation directly from the code.

Also I had to make other animation implementations for specific animation nodes depending on if she is running, crouching or on ladders.

Our game is not a real action game but more a puzzle game. We wanted our enemies to be both a challenge to deal with but also easy to kill. As easy as a Mario game. That's why, in our game, a simple click on an enemi that we can reach will make our character go automaticaly in a certain distance of the enemie an play a take down combo.

My job here, was to detect if an enemy is reachable, if so, make the player move to it. Then integrate all animations data to play the combo. There were 4 different combos depending on if we used left or right click and if we were far or close to the target. 

It was pretty much my first experience using UDK. So this project made me learn a lot of things.

• UnrealScript: pawn, controller, animation, states, and most of the language and common class basics
• Unreal Engine
• Perforce
• Distance working: we were two programers working at Chicoutimi (QC) while the rest of the team was at Montreal
• Team working: taking time to understand artists needs and then to answer them.