Villac | Alan ROBLEDILLO

Villac: Presentation

Pitch:

In Villac, you play Ray Forest, veteran detective of the Scientific Police Force, having to solve a political murder weakening the recent Republic.

Theme: 1880's Paris inspired, slightly retrofuturistic
Genre: Detective Game

Camera: First Person
Platform: PC with keyboard and mouse
Engine: Unreal
Project Type: School Project
Team: 6 Game Designers and 6 Game Artists

Trailer

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Context

Villac is an end-of-study project carried out in 3 and a half months of production before presenting it to a jury, following certain constraints. The game demo should only last 5 to 10 minutes maximum, and absolutely all the assets present, as well as the codes, must be entirely made by the team, nothing must be taken from the internet or other.

For this project that we wanted to be fundamentally narrative, the Game Art team had the idea to integrate facial motion capture, in order to give more life to the characters, as well as dubbing, which was a real challenge for us.

Because of the quarantine due to Covid-19, we've teleworked during 2/3 of our production, so all the dubbing had to be done remotely and it was a huge challenge for us.

What I've done:

as a Narrative Designer

Narrative Design

Once the universe was set up, Jérôme Trotta and I set up the walkthrough of the demo while keeping in mind our will to make it an episodic format and thus to follow up on this investigation.
After several reworkings, we decided on a shorter version than our initial idea in order to respect our presentation time constraint limited to 15 minutes for the demo.
Once the walkthrough was determined, we summarized it with a diagram:

First of all, I worked on the elaboration of a universe with solid foundations allowing us to place our characters and our investigation into it.

Parallel to this, I wrote our character sheets to allow Character Artists and Environment Artists to create characters and places that are logically consistent with our universe and our investigation.
These sheets were also very useful for our dubbing actors to put themselves in character.

Then I worked with Jérôme on the sequence of events before the murder to be sure of the coherence between my dialogues and his in-game texts.
So we created this "schedule" by character useful for the investigation of the demo:

I then wrote the dialogues for each main character, including the emotions we wanted to convey to the player through facial motion capture and dubbing:

Then, after the secondary characters (clients and prostitutes) were placed in the brothel, I took screenshots of each little scene they were forming and then wrote the dialogues and gave them on to our dubbing actors.