Games

“THE FINALS”

The videogame I am currently working on at Embark Studios. I contributed to the physics subsystems that allow for level destruction in the game, and to its debug visualization.

“Arc Raiders”

The first videogame I worked on at professional level at Embark Studios. I contributed to the physically-based animation (PBA) effort behind the largest enemies in the game, adding features to the machine learning pipeline, modifying the interface to PhysX inside Unreal Engine 4, and creating tools to accelerate the import of assets.

The enemies are robots that are not animated in the classical way, but instead they have a trained “Machine learning brain” that learned how to deambulate by using their limbs. You can learn more on this article by Tom Solberg (one of my direct colleagues during this project).

“OHR” and “Radiant Square”

Game and physical controller prototypes created together with Adriano Siesser, Andrea Conci, Raul Masu and Zeno Menestrina. “OHR” is a game created to explore different modalities of play, both classical and tangible, powered by Unity3D and a custom-built hardware interface called “Radiant Square (Radiant2)”. I participated in every phase of the creation of the project, focusing on game design, interaction with the game artist, physical prototype design and feeling, paper writing and presentation.

The project won the Jury Prize at the Student Game Competition of CHI Play 2014. A video presentation of the game prototype can be watched here.

“City Spirits” and “Magnum Opus”

“City Spirits”, and its evolution “Magum Opus”, was a research project on long-term behavioural change through gaming. It involved urban ethnography, user research, focus groups, and cognitive science research.

Both the games aimed at motivating people to walk more by first providing an external motivation, while aiming to internalize the motivation by make the players interact with the world around them.

The game had strong theory foundations, but it was left incomplete once I left the PhD.

“Bisoux”

Project created for the Games [4Design] Jam at CHI’13 in a team. It’s a physical controller based game that helped people getting accustomed to the way of greeting in France: each player wore a “pendant”, an Arduino board with batteries and a red LED Matrix, and two “kiss sensors” on their cheeks. The target was to go around the conference floor to greet people by touching both cheeks. Each time the greeting was done correctly a big pixel-art heart would fill. The first player to fill the heart was the winner. I worked on the game design and the implementation of the game.

“Terraforma”

“Terraforma” is a game I made with Nicolas Silva in Unity3D for the course “Introduction to Computer Game Prototyping” at Technical University of Denmark. It’s a stealth game with physics-based combat system. The player character cannot attack directly the enemies and has to either navigate wihout being seen or neutralize the enemies using her terrain manipulation powers to lower or raise the ground. Features a dynamic water level system, an enemy area of operations editor for level creation and 2.5D graphics.

High school projects

High school was a strange time: I had a few friends that were into strange self-made paper games and they were playing them through lessons or during time off.

I helped them adding new stuff to those games, then I helped testing an implementation in Visual Basic of one of these games, “Road to Al Capone”.

Together we tried to make a survival game based on the real geometry of our school, creating a converter from CAD models to FBX. I worked more on the game design and on the story.

Together with one of these friends I made a small, silly, RPGMaker game called “Medievo 2013”.