Video game making has been at the heart of my interests and a great learning engine for a long time. It all started with an already old copy of Dark BASIC falling by some kind of chance into my hands when I was about thirteen. From this first contact grew a ramified curiosity about all technical and artistic fields of video game. This motivated me to learn a lot by myself before I could get to a more academic teaching of programming and computer arts.

Dark BASIC logo

I present here my history of video game making backwards — recent work first — for more eye-catchiness, but you could consider reading it from the bottom up.

Download: https://v3.globalgamejam.org/2021/games/patchup-8

Patch Up! is a 2-player puzzle game where one needs to reunite with the other player. A dangerous attempt to create an online game in a game jam! Developed during the Global Game Jam 2021.

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Website: https://ggj-ipparis.fr

While the n-th wave of COVID lockdown was hitting, I took care of a remote site of the Global Game Jam, meant for students of Institut Polytechnique de Paris, where I was doing my PhD and teaching. As most of these students had never done a Game Jam, we took care of hosting resources and motivational content on our website.

Lonely Island is the result of an environment art jam, for which we focused on the visual and audio landscape more than on the gameplay. It was also my first game jam done using Unreal Engine and MegaScan.

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Source: [GitHub]

Town Builder is a little experiment aiming at reproducing core elements of Oskar Stålberg's amazing Townscaper for educational purpose. This led me to write the BMeshUnity library, and the study of the WFC algorithm eventually drove me to develop MesoGen.

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Download: https://eliemichel.itch.io/once-upon-a-peddler

Once upon a peddler is a puzzle game loosely based on the Wolf, Goat and Cabbage Tale where the player must bring back lost pets to their associated village while preventing them from eating each others! It has been produced with a fully remote team of 12 people during the first covid lock down.

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Download: https://sam-circle.itch.io/7e-ciel

7e ciel is an asymmetric multi-player rhythm game about orgasm. The players must communicate only by touching their hand to synchronize sound and action.

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La rue a des yeux is a prototype for a project of in-situ augmented reality experience built around graphs from the street artist DaCruz. My focus on this project was to give life to DaCruz' art by adding organic animations and designing a creature following the graphic spirit of the original graphs, and to integrate it into Unity. A draft can be found on ShaderToy.

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Download: https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/roommatch

In RoomMatch, you must drag and drop people around apartments to balance the mental load and prevent one person from doing all the house work alone. You win when everybody feels safe home. It has been realized for the Global Game Jam 2019 at Cergy.

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In USB4, you must take care of your space station as random maintainance issues occur. This game was developed during a small jam with colleagues from the Computer Graphics lab of Télécom Paris. I only worked on 3D assets as many other team members were developpers.

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Itch.io: https://bloodyfoxie.itch.io/shiver

Empire of the Ordinary is an escape game in virtual reality exploring Magritte's art. It is first born during the Digital Art Jam 2018 at Centre Pompidou. This was at the time my first experiment with VR. Since then, it has been produced further by Tamanoir and has been selected at the Geneva International Film Festival GIFF20.

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Play in browser: [HTML]

Monument Alley is a study of how the wonderful game Monument Valley works. The main curiosity of this game is that it plays on perspective paradoxes, and reproducing them in a 3D renderer is a fun challenge. Seamless transitions when the character moves through the illusion adds to the difficulty. Another property of the original game is that it is very polished, and I wanted to get a bit of polish in my remake as well, especially on the animations.

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A note about remakes

I believe that remaking is the most instructing exercise for learning an art and its techniques. It allows one to focus exclusively on the how, without worrying too much on the why, while still letting room for some innovation.

Play in browser: [HTML]

L'Âne de Buridan is an absurd "Paint Game" inspired by the practice of Rémy Sohier. The goal is to build a game in only a couple of hours and by using only MS Paint to create graphic assets.

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Website: http://reverbere.exppad.com/

L'Allumeur de Réverbères is a mixed reality video-game where you help a child to light up their city by building actual platforms. The game controller is made of actual platforms on which a virtual character can walk. The shadow of the player also interacts with the game, turning the virtual lights off. It is acquired by a Kinect's depth sensor.

L'Allumeur de Réverbères as been selected for exhibition at Laval Virtual 2018 from April 4th to April 8th, 2018 in the category Virtual Fantasy Demo. It has been awarded and will hence be exhibited at IVRC 2018, Tokyo, Japan. It also got the special mention for interactivity.

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Presentation page: [HTML]

Trouble-Neige is a 2d adventure game in which the main character interacts with its environment mostly through their emotions. When facing a situation, the character (named Trouble-Neige) can react with one emotion or another (anger, sadness, etc.), which results in a different perception of the world. Each emotion is associated with a given mechanism. When sad, Trouble-Neige can make the rain fall. Being angry prevents them from going to some areas, but allows them to break some walls.

Trouble-Neige grew up in an overprotecting world but their hyper-sensibility leads them to leave the village. Then starts a traveler's tale split into six chapters, all leading to the discovery of a new mood world. The organization of these chapters is not sequential and rather determined by the emotions that the player decides to react with in the previous levels. March 2018: Two scenes have been implemented for now, namely the tutorial scene and the village escape. The game is still in development.

Extract of the game design storyboard

Although it started as a short term project, I got interested in providing maximal freedom to the artist and level designer by extending the Unity editor. This really helped us parallelizing the work by providing quick previews to the artist, and reduced boilerplate when updating assets.

Custom editor extension developed for quicker level prototyping and preview

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Play in browser on itch.io: https://eliemichel.itch.io/urban-exodus

Urban Exodus is a mini-game where one solves puzzles to make city tiles turn into nature tiles. It was developed during a game-jam-like exam at ATI, and so in only 12 hours. Assets have been built with the help of Polyworld, another of our projects at ATI.

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Download: https://eliemichel.itch.io/mesdames-messieurs

Mesdames Messieurs is a game made during the Global Game Jam 2018 inspired from top lists of real messages from the SNCF or the SNCB, which can be very imaginative. The game splits in two parts, first driving, then apologizing, because ultimately you'll get into an accident, or face some kind of issue. The game will ensure that.

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Le Quatre de Chiffre is a restaurant where you must defend your fridge against rats. It is a tower-defense game where one must put traps and reload them to catch rats while ensuring that the restaurant remains clean enough.

This game was developed during a small jam with colleagues from Télécom ParisTech. Most people there were developers so I had the opportunity to jam only as a 3d artist, not touching a line of code.

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From 2011 to 2017, my work has been more focused on research and theory, as well as more general purpose programming and exploration of other fields such as Machine Learning. Check out my résumé for more information.

Nevertheless, here is a rough presentation of some of these works which where related to Video Games, although more oriented towards engine development than game creation.

Distance field based 3d modeling GUI and ray marching (2017)

Project on GitHub: https://github.com/eliemichel/RayStep

WebGL GLTF loader (2017)

Play in browser: [HTML]

Multi-scale real-time rendering (2017)

M.Sc. Internship report: [PDF]

Procedural landscapes (2014)

Eurographics 2015 Paper: [PDF]

WIP thread on BlenderClan: [HTML]

GooBlender is a remake of World of Goo. The toon style attracted me, and it was the occasion to show that the Blender Game Engine handles 2D games very well.

First prototype of GooBlender

It started as a technical demonstration of the elastic constraint system available in the physic engine of the BGE, and its quick development allowed me to spend more time on the scenario, gameplay and graphical art.

Experimentation of live terrain destruction and fluids

I was looking for technical challenges. Graph algorithms like the path finding used to determine the victory, rudimentary hand-made fluid simulation to integrate water to the gameplay, live update of collision meshes to be able to destroy some parts of the terrain, like in the Worms, etc.

Walkthrough

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WIP thread on BlenderClan: [HTML]

This is a remake of Portal, though I wrote this game before trying the original. The dark humor and style of the trailer had immediately convinced me and rather than running to the next game store I decided to reproduce it. I started with the trailer itself:

Walkthrough

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2009 - 2011

High Speed Racer (HSR) is a futuristic space ship racing game close to Wipeout, though I did not know the latter at the time. This is my first truly collaborative project, for which I've met people and worked with them for almost two years.

BloodThirsty

OldBike

Course en multijoueur

Menu de création de serveur

This is also the first game for which I tried to care about promotion beyond just updating a WIP thread on a forum. We developed a project's website, that we tried to keep attractive by filling it with tutorials about problem we had solved about the Blender Game Engine during the production. Unfortunately, this project also taught me never to trust my web host and to back things up. We lost the whole website and tutorials (modulo The Wayback Machine [1] [2]).

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This is the furthest I could get to find a finished game in my archives. Charyol is a headless turn-based strategy game for four players. Everybody must collaborate for their civilization to take off, but will start fighting once they're independent enough. This game was first created as a board game.

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Another of my first games, written in Dark BASIC, inspired by a tutorial for ZX81, reproduced lately in Processing for the purpose of this screenshot (2007)