BlackWater Crimes is a detective mobile game developed in one semester during my third year at SupinfoGame.
BlackWater Crimes is a very immersive experience which takes place in Chicago, USA, by the end of the Roarin' 20s. The player is a rookie detective who has to discover the truth behind the savage murder of a young pretty lady, Anna. During his investigation, the player will face the worst sins of humankind: mafia, prostitution, corruption, slavery...
my roles:
Vision Owner
Level Architect
Gameplay Programmer
I always have been fascinated by history and some historic periods are truly thrilling. The twenties are full of contradictions, synonym of luxury and technological revolution but also synonym of war trauma and prohibition issues. That is why I wanted to create a game experience which highlights those contradictions. The Detective game genre allowed me to display, in a short-time experience, all the woes of this historic period. In addition, I didn't want to make a typical hyper-casual mobile game. I consider that the mobile game market lacks games that provide a complete immersive experience in an interesting universe. Therefore, my idea was to create a mobile experience with a strong identity that offers a complete ludo-narrative experience like most of PC games. My classmates were interested by this idea. Thus, the BlackWater Crimes project was selected in order to be developed.
Since this project is my original idea, I got the role of "Vision Owner". In other words, I had to lead the Game Design team but also ensure that every person of the team had the same mindset and the same point of view about the game. I worked a lot with my Artistic Director in order to guarantee a strong and unique creative direction. The team wanted each new idea, each creative change to be submitted to my approval. By doing this, we were able to stick to the intentions and the original concept.
Also, I worked as Level Architect. Level Architect is a very particular role, according to me, it is the joint between Level Design and Level Art. Since BWC (BlackWater Crimes) is a detective game, the "levels" are actually scenes which contain clues. The clues are disposed in the scenes and the player has to find them, click on them and photograph them. The main challenge is about investigation, the player has find the relevant clues. So the main focus about designing those scenes was to guide the players' eyes to the clues he need. This task was my favorite part in the creation process of BWC. It was a design and an artistic challenge and I felt very comfortable and enthusiastic about it. I worked a lot with the environment artists about the scene's saliency. We worked on colors, shapes, camera placement, etc. The truth is that, at that time, I didn't know that this task was an actual job in the video game industry. I discovered it the next year, with Christophe Lefaure, Level Architect at Arkhane and I'm truly fascinated by this role.
I am one of the most technical profile in my Game Design class. I always seek to be autonomous and a driving force for the team. In third year students are still separated in two class: Game Design & Game Art and there is not a specific class for Game Programming yet. So, in order to be able to make a complete game experience, I worked as Vision Owner, Level Architect, but also as Gameplay Programmer. Another student was working with me on programming but his skills are more code architecture and system programming oriented. Therefore, gameplay programming fitted me as my programming skills are gameplay features oriented. We worked together and I learned a lot thanks to him. I learned to clean my scripts, making them faster to compute, easier to implement into a complex code architecture, but also easier to read for my fellow programmers.
BlackWater Crimes is one of my projects that makes me very proud. The school jury gave it very good critics. I think we really managed to make a game that sticks to its orignal intentions while being fun and immersive.
Intro Cinematic:
Images:
Suspects, attorney, informants...
Original music tracks:
Game Bible (texts in french):
The team:
Game Designers
Eliot Ringeval LinkedIn
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Hugo Bochaton LinkedIn
Maxence Droz-Bartholet LinkedIn
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Titouan Mergem LinkedIn