Game IN is an association created in 2009 by video game professionals based in the North of France, in order to set up a structure capable of creating and maintaining a real ecosystem, and to support all private and public initiatives concerning video games in all their forms.

The objective is to implement any action to structure, animate, strengthen and promote the development of the video game industry in the North of France.

Since its creation, Game IN has been able to count on the support and attention of the territories. The Hauts-de-France Region and the European Metropolis of Lille actively contribute to the strength of the local industry.

The association also works closely with the Plaine Images incubator to offer a production follow-up program to incubated studios.

Game Concept

The project aimed to be a single player experience, playable on a web browser while having a retro 2d pixel-art style.
The game uses relatively simple controls: directional arrows to move and some additional keys. All this, with a top-down camera view.

The concept was to gamify and stage the regional video game ecosystem, its history and its games by projecting it in a retro top-down game village with some gameplay loops.

Each member of the ecosystem would be represented by an area, a building, etc. of his choice to which he would contribute.

The whole thing was to showcase the industry and its ecosystem with gameplay codes that everyone knows. This, by including everyone, namely: studios, providers, schools, partners, territories, etc.

The project's ambition was to make the association known, as well as its role and all the members who make it up.

Proposed gameplay

You play as a character in search of adventure and knowledge about the companies in the region.
The player will evolve in a GAME-IN world with the appearance of an open world, in which he will be able to wander in the region by following or not quests.

We were very keen to carry out this project in collaboration with Game IN and in order to transcribe as well as possible what the association wanted, we had long discussions with Mr. Laurent Peroy, who was then the association's general delegate. As a result of these exchanges, we were able to come up with a strong base that was relatively close to Game IN's intentions.

Having only 3 months to realize this project, we decided to set up a quest putting forward a small group of members with a mini game.

Featured Members

We have chosen 6 companies from the list of members to create our prototype. These companies are ;

• E-Artsup
• Accidental Queens
• Couch Game Crafter
• Nacon
• Ordi Retro
• BPF Records

From these 6 companies, we created a narrative arc with a quest system that links them together.
If we were to add more companies we would have created other story arcs that would be intertwined with the one previously created to offer a larger and more complete adventure.

Through a dialogue system, the company will be able to tell its story and the player will be able to learn more about it if he wants.

Universe

For this prototype, we wanted to highlight the region of Hauts-de-France by creating a card with the shape of this region. However, due to the short production time we had and the few members we were going to represent, we only used the upper part of this region.

Hub

Represented by a square, the Hub will include:

• The Game IN building acts as a "credit", where you can see all the members and those who are no longer part of it.
• A store to customize your avatar (Quest rewards will enhance the customization possibilities).
• A Tavern-like building, which could eventually become a multiplayer meeting place where players can chat with each other and with companies. (Companies will have personal accounts assigned to them).

City

They will group a few members together and feature them in quests that allow players to discover them.

Area

Customized locations for each company outside the city where the player can learn more about them.

Our jury, composed of several members of the Game In board of directors, liked this project so much that our group was selected to continue this project during our 3rd year as an internship within the association.

What is the agile method ?

The objective of the agile method is to plan the setting of short-term objectives. Contrary to the traditional method which foresees the total planning of the project even before the development phase. The project is thus fragmented into several sub-parts, which the development teams in charge of it must achieve progressively, adjusting the objectives if necessary to meet the customer's expectations as much as possible.
The objectives are thus to be achieved during a period called "sprint". Each sprint has the objective of closing a brick of the project.

How did we use it ?

Estimation of tasks

The beginning of our internship was marked by these estimates. Using the skills we had, we estimated the time it would take to complete each production task.
We then classified all these estimates in a "backlog" by noting the order of priority of the task as well as its development time (corresponding to our estimation time X 1.5).

Task Tracking

To follow the evolution of our tasks, we used "Trello" which allowed us to have a visual on which task was in progress and who was in charge of its realization. Our "Trello" was regularly updated by our project manager who ensured that the project was running smoothly.

The Sprints

Once the tasks were estimated, we were able to focus on the production by using "sprints" to ensure a continuous production. Our sprints consisted of 2 weeks of production, with the need to have a playable build at the end of the 2 weeks to see the evolution of the project and the points to improve.

The Meetings

For the good progress of the project, we had set up two types of Meetings :

• The "Daily Meeting" that we did every morning in order to know what everyone had done the day before and to assign the tasks that will be done during the day.
• The "Weekly Meeting" which was done every Friday night, in order to coordinate with our Game Artist so that they could know what assets we needed for the following week.

In order to best represent the members in our production, we set up interviews with each member to give them the opportunity to be represented as they wished.

During our interviews we were mainly looking for some information, in order to help us to integrate them as well as possible.
The information we were looking for was :

• Their activity(ies)
• Partners / Founders
• Their flagship work(s)
• Their intentions / valuers
• Their Report to Game In
• How did they want to be represented in the game?
• A story or stories that link them to Game IN or another member

Each interview led us to meet multiple people, all different from each other, but also to realize that several companies had similar stories.

Dialogues were very important in our project, however, due to lack of time during the production of the prototype, we had to skip perfecting this feature by just having quest dialogues.

My task was to remedy this by developing a functional dialogue system that would include questions about the npj as well as quest-related questions.

We wanted to make the dialogue system as inclusive as possible, in particular by adding the possibility to choose your gender when creating your avatar (Male / Female / Non-Binary). So my goal was to have dialogs using the player's avatar name, but tuning the dialogs about the player, depending on the gender entered.

The information boards were located in each member's building and were used to gather information about the member in question. These boards were there to break the fourth wall and to learn more about the members.

The quests were our gameplay loops. We made sure that we had a story that was specific to the group of members in the quest, using the stories we collected during our interviews and adding a mini-game for each quest to keep the project fun.
We developed each quest together, in order to have a logical path and to have a fun quest to do.