Parabiosis

Sparkling Vinegar - 2021-2022 - PC

Parabiosis was a retro-styled survival-horror project inspired from the classics of the genre such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill. The player character had to invade other characters inner worlds to help them or harm them in order to survive in a mycelium infested island.

I spent 16 months designing and developing all the needed game mechanics and editor tools. From the combat systems to the puzzle mechanics through our innovating rendering technique that allowed to fake pre-rendered backgrounds.

It was a ton of works and I'm still heartbroken that I had to abandon the project due to team frictions. That being said, much of the features can be salvaged and I'm planning to do just that in the near future.


Magic Hat

Sparkling Vinegar - 2020 - PC

A Rogue-lite Isometric bullet hell where the player must absorb bullets to attack.

That prototype is an attempt to remake one of my previous game jam entry into a full game. It got a pretty solid bullet system, stats, item effects, custom collision and other neat features. All of these were also adapted to a 2d isometric projection.

But, while I'm proud of what I achieved on that project, the 2d isometric presentation added just too many unexpected technical hurdles to overcome. I might revisit that project in the future but using a 3d presentation instead.


Type or Die

Sparkling Vinegar - 2019 - PC

A 3d Rogue-lite typing game. It was an attempt at making Sega's Typing of the Dead more replayable by injecting it with your typical Rogue-lite mechanics like randomized levels, item effects and perma-death.

I spent a lot of time iterating on the core-gameplay to make sure that it doesn't only challenge the typing speed. Enemies have different stats, attacks but also their own "typing challenges" that must be completed to defeat them. Such as answering a question or typing letters in the right order. The prototype went as far as including the random level generation, a map system and full mod support.

I developed a ton of tools (even a WPF-based editor) for that project and yet I had to stop working on it as it became clear that it was too challenging for me. I still love the concept so I might scope it down and revisit it in the future.


Robo Combo

Sparkling Vinegar - 2018 - PC

Prototype video PC Build

What started as an exercise to recreate the multilayered terrain system of Warcraft 3 ended up being a prototype for a top down action RPG. It also features a pretty deep combo system (hence the name), dual wielding, projectiles and a creature system that allowed me to quickly add enemy types with their own behaviors and equipment.

This project had to stop mostly due to technical limits. I had trouble to properly manage a large number of objects and actors in Unity at the time. If the game can't run smoothly when so little is implemented, I usually consider that as a red flag for a long-term project.

I definitely need to reuse the terrain and the combo system in some future project. Holding two spears at the same time to get special combos never gets old.