Welcome to my new blog! I will move old blog posts that used to be on the previous wordpress website and start to write more blog posts about games programming and interesting questions that my students asked.

Let’s wrap up 2024. A lot of things happened this year for me and I wanted to share them.

Earlier this year, I organized the RGB Games Programming Conference - Green Edition. I finally edited the video of the talks here. I was very lucky to have the support of the SAE Institute Geneva and the French embassy to bring Swiss and French speakers. It was pretty hard to get speakers outside of my social circles. Probably the most disappointing for me was that it seemed that most of the game programmers working in studio in the local area did not want or did not even care about a games programming conference. For me, it is simply a sign that we are not ready to upgrade the kind of production that we can make locally. We will continue to outsource outside of Switzerland and not learn from it. Organizing a conference made me realize the cost and effort behind it. I will always deeply respect the people behind any conference. I was very lucky to have an amazing team that I did not need to micro-manage, because they ruled.

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It took some time to write this post-mortem. It was a long week those last ten days from 8th to 18th of August, but with a little team, we manage to create a little game called Black Whiskers. Without transition, here is the post-mortem:

What went right

• Super pro team. We were efficient, high-quality assets. Awesome no?
• We were all motivated bythe initial idea and could expand on it (by adding two more levels)
• I was able to put dumb jokes in the game and some crazy narration.

What went wrong

• Asthom had some trouble with his schedule, so sound design suffered a bit
• A first level and gameplay WAY TOO HARD for a simple game jam entry (probably due by the fact that Hack'n'Slash is not the genre for Game Boy)
• Some problems with pixel-perfect on Unity

In the end, it was still a very funny gamejam, we laughed a lot with Alexis. Now, I need to do a game jam without cats.

I feel like a sedentary person. I mean I’m a geek… if I’m far from my computer, I’m not at home. And it was fine for me the previous week. I just had enough of crunch time for the summer holidays and I just needed some chilling time with some friends. I was at the same location 5 years ago, with the same friends and at that time, I had restarted the first year of EPFL. Time has changed and now I’m following my dreams. I had this awkward feeling to see my 5-years younger self and to tell to calm down. I sing a lot of “Father and Son” with this attitude.

Coming back from this week is hard for me. I have to start working again after one week of laziness. I have to clean my room (sigh!) before going back to Zürich. I will meet the Swiss-French Game Developers on Wednesday. I have to work on Splash until the end of September for all the conventions we are doing at the end of the month. And I just want to do nothing =(

Ok, back to reality!

It was a long boring, hot month of July. It started right with some holidays in the north of Italy and in Austria, it was epic with the Epic Game Jam, then the Meetup BBQ was awesome to set up new projects and finally the Project Annoucement meeting with Kevin for the Project Splash. And then, civil service… I am still working until the 23th of August in the CRYOS lab to help on the front-end of swissex, a scientific data website. So most of my time is spent writing html and css, the dream of all computer scientists (says none of them). But then, came August and the deadline for SwitzerLAN “Swiss” Game Designer contest (you can find more on this blog post about something that I consider a minority discrimination: here), where I proposed “Project Splash”.

So now, I gather a little team for GBJam from 8th to 18th August to make a boss-rush hack’n’slash with cat pirates (Temporary Title: Catptain Hook: Revengence).