YOANN SCHULER
My Work
Concept
As the originator of the concept, I had two main tasks regarding the concept and preproduction phase : making sure my vision was coherent and engaging, and making sure my vision was clear to the rest of the team. I took part in a lot of brainstorming, presenting, and discussing on all of the ideas and references the game had.
System Design
Shared Lands is heavily inspired by very system-rich games, and thus is very system-rich itself. I worked on several core systems of the game (and several versions of each, too). My main task on this end was the design of one of our game's USP, the Titan, a neutral entity that roams the map and acts in between players' turn.
Documentation
Documents also were a central part of my tasks on this project : slide presentations to explain new mechanics to the team, exhaustive mechanic documents destined to the gameplay programmer, as well as simple design documents to keep track of decisions and ideas.
Playtests
Playtesting, both between ourselves and with external playtesters, was a central part of my tasks as well. I prepared playtest protocols, organised sessions, and compiled feedbacks, in order to prioritize correctly our next moves.
The Project
Shared Lands started out as a 4X game with asymetrical factions and win conditions, where a giant neutral entities, the Titans, would jeopardize each player's strategy periodically. We kept all of that, except the game reduced its scope from a 4X to a simpler strategy game, inspired by boardgames, and we merged the Titans for them to become the Titan (singular). We decided on this route both to meet the expectations of our final jury and to ensure a better quality and test time for each implemented system.
The Team
I had the chance of working on Shared Lands with this great team :
Alexandre Daspe - Game Programmer
Emeric Delemer - Game Designer
Hugo Dontzow - System Designer
Florian Fraresso - Lead Game Artist
Romeo Racine - Lead Game Programmer
Toinon Robaux - UI and Game Programmer
Rémi Sutra-Lanut - VFX and Tech Artist
Corentin Veran - Producer and Character Artist
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Big thanks to all of them for the work on this project, and the year we spent together!
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