Key Takeways

Game design experience

Teamwork!

Organization in indie video game pipelines

Knowledge on building business plans

Kickstarter production experience

As one of the founding members of Astrolabe Interactive, I’ve worked on SYF as a game designer for the game, but also as a UI/UX consultant and a Kickstarter producer. Throughout this journey, I’ve gained a better knowledge of my craft, as well as hands-on experience with start-ups in the independent video game industry. This is partially thanks to my senior mentors Pascal Nataf (Affordance) and Christopher Chancey (ManaVoid Entertainment).

Astrolabe Interactive

Appearance at several events :

Festival Montréal Joue 2018

Comiccon 2019

MEGA-MIGS 2019

Pax East 2019

Indie Game Zone 2019

Funded with Kickstarter

Madness system

The second design aspect I worked on was the “life points / mad points”. Madness is a recurring theme in Lovecraft’s work, and it was particularly important for me to showcase this in the overall design of the game: when a character is hit, they lose “life points” and becomes easily ejectable. At the same time, they win “mad points” and gains physical strength.

The goals were to create tension in the players, an element of surprise in the course of the game’s events, and to put forward the feeling of risk-return tradeoff.

2D VS 3D

The initial design portrayed 2D characters in a 3D environment, similar to Paper Mario. When the prototype completed, the results were not as we had hoped. Problems regarding perspective and unwanted parallax effects forced us to redefine the game plan, this time, only in 3D. Once we’d adopted the necessary modifications, the team noticed a better comprehension of the character's position in the environment, an essential element in a combat game. A delay or offset in-depth, miscalculated by the player could potentially make them fail an attack and cause frustration.