L'ÉVEIL DE FANTASIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH16sI9tr7A

To download the game : L'Éveil de Fantasia by ArtFX School (itch.io)

Hello everyone!

I hope you are doing well during this complicated period.

In this post I'm going to tell you about L'ÉVEIL DE FANTASIA ( produced in 2 months ) and my work as a Producer and Game Designer ( Game Design , Level Design , UX Design and Gameplay Programming ) .

L'ÉVEIL DE FANTASIA is a stealth game based on Jacques Offenbach's Fairy Opera Le Voyage dans la Lune (1875) which has a message about women's liberation (through the prism of Fantasia). This game was commissioned by the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier to bring together a young audience playing the video games of the Opera.

We have decided to reinterpret Act III, the thirteenth scene from the Women's Market.

Indeed, the earth prince Caprice decides to leave to explore the Moon. He discovers the selenite people and falls in love with the princess of the Moon, Fantasia. He offers her an apple, she eats it and discovers new feelings including love. But on the Moon it is forbidden to have feelings, and in the Opera the selenite women are considered as decorative objects. Faced with this heresy, Fantasia's father King Cosmos sends him to the Women's Market. So we decided to replace this place by a prison located in a huge cave. This prison which is the symbol of the oppression of King Cosmos. And Fantasia escaping from this place frees herself from the chains of her father.

From left to right: Agathe Turlotte, me (Henri Bessou), Mathilde Durand, Corentin Zimmermann, Thomas Le Roux, Antoine Borde, Paola Gibernau, Klara Goetz, Lisa Ros, Lucie Hennet and Alexandre Cerovic

To manage a team of 11 people from ARTFX and 6 Sound Designers from the Audio Workshop school, at this particular time I set up a Discord server to facilitate communication.A Google Drive to share data and files.To have a visibility of our production I created a Jira to display the different tasks to be performed in a given time.And for more efficiency, I set up a Source Control on the Unreal Engine (Tortoise SVN and Dropbox). We also had a weekly review to show our client the progress of the project.

At the beginning we proposed several game ideas like a racing game, a third person shooter and finally a stealth game.

For the stealth game we took for reference the saga Styx and Metal Gear Solid (for infiltration) and Hellblade (for narration).

At first, the game had to have an infiltration phase then an action phase. But not feasible with the time given to realize the game.So we decided to focus on the infiltration part.

For this we focused on the behavior of AI (Guards): they spot us if we walk next to them, if we are too close to them or if Fantasia is in their vision ( cone of light ).

And also on the cover proposed by the stalagmites to avoid being spotted, and on the activation of crystals to open their associated doors to continue the progression in the level.

If the guards spot you again at the last checkpoint. A checkpoint system has been set up to avoid punishing the player too much when he gets caught.

For the Level Design part, I wanted to show the rise and emancipation of Fantasia with a level that goes up as Fantasia progresses in prison, and in the end get out and regain the surface of the Moon.

First Blockout

It was important for me to discover a magical universe and that the player could quickly locate himself thanks to the implementation of a vista.

Another important point, a perspective work was done as well as a view on the end of the level to guide the player on the path to take.

To best meet the quality of the game, I resumed the work of my colleague to improve each room present in the level. And follow a curve of intensity of difficulty related to Level Design.

As you can see on this graph, the music also intensifies as you progress through the cave.

Florent Solut did some very good work on the composition of the music.Since he took over the scores of Jacques Offenbach from the Marché aux Femmes, he applied a relative minor and also to create a recall of the Choeurs of the Opéra during the Marché aux Femmes.

We have seen together for the elaboration of the infiltration music so that it intensifies following the progression of Fantasia in the prison.

I set up an option menu to ensure that the game can run on the most computers configuration with different graphic and sound parameters.

To include a maximum of player I decided to implement 5 languages ( French, English, Spanish, German and Italian) for the menus and subtitles of the game as for the kinematics of the beginning. As well as a port on MacOS.

Finally, I did some work on the accessibility of people with colour blindness (Protanopia, Deuteranopia and Tritanopia) by creating filters that allow to better differentiate the colors according to the type of colour blindness.

These last features were not requested by the customer but it was important to me to integrate it.

I would like to thank ARTFX and all the teaching team, L'Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier and Audio Workshop. CREDITS Opéra Orchestre de Montpellier

Valérie CHEVALIER (Publishing Director) Audrey BRAHIMI (Digital Communication and Numerical Projects)

ArtFX Promo 2022

Henri BESSOU (Producer/ Game designer)

Antoine BORDE (Artistic director/Character artist) Klara GOETZ (props artist/FX artist/concept artist) Alexandre CEROVIC (Environment artist/Level artist) Lisa ROS (Cinematic artist) Joris DOUCET (Character artist/Light artist/UI artist) Paola GIBERNAU (Gameplay animator/Rigger) Lucie HENNET (Gameplay animator/Rigger) Corentin ZIMMERMANN (Props artist)

Mathilde DURAND (Props artist) Thomas LE ROUX (Game designer)

Audio Workshop

Maxance PLAYEZ (Lead sound designer) Florent SOLUT (Music composer) Louise JEANSON (Sound designer) Joachim TANDJAOUI (Sound designer) Aristide HERSANT PREVERT (Sound designer) Nicolas SANCHEZ (Sound designer)

VOICES Irène MOULIN (Fantasia) Manon GIBERT ( Narrator)

SPECIAL THANKS

Lucas Gille

Gabriel Garcia Samuel Hoareau Allan Magagnosc Ludovic Oddi Arden Hemkes Edwards Ernesto Borboa Lizarraga

To the ArtFX team.

In collaboration with l’Opéra Orchestre de Montpellier.

In partnership with Audio Workshop.

To download the game : L'Éveil de Fantasia by ArtFX School (itch.io)