Glitch
Context
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The third year of the Bachelor's program at ESMA Rennes consists of making a game for a year, then presenting it to a jury at the end of the year.
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As students, we have to get together in groups of three (1 game designer, 1 art director, 1 programmer) to accommodate concepts during the summer holidays, then present them at the start of the school year.
Our teachers then selects six projects which are valid and then assigns the students to each project.
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Originally, Glitch was a secondary project. In fact, during my two-and-a-half-month vacation, I worked for about a month and a half on our main project. I took a three-week vacation, then spent about three weeks on Glitch.
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As you can imagine, it was Glitch that won, thanks to its ambition and originality.
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What is Glitch ?
Pitch
Glitch is a single-player tower defense and infiltration game on the PC, in which the player embodies a 3rd-person character evolving in a medieval world corrupted by a strange void.
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The battle between this corruption and the world generates singularities affecting the entire universe.
The player must progress by infiltrating the corrupted territory, identifying and capturing key infrastructures.
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Once the player considers he has achieved his objective, he must survive the waves of enemies by generating his own defenses.
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Creative intent
Originally, Glitch was a project designed to challenge all the creative aspects of video games, from game design and programming to 3D modeling and storytelling.
It's a very ambitious project, distinguished by the fact that it's a game combining both Tower Defense and Infiltration.
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The team
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Aubert Matthieu (Able to create incredible visual effects in limited time, as well as being highly multitask)
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Bauchet Tristan (That's me, having worked on the project design and taken on the role of team manager)
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Breton Florian (Game designer with excellent multitasking skills, who also took on the role of sound designer)
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Paul Nguyen (Able to create a complex story with multiple reading levels as quickly as Matthieu can distract our coder by clowning around)
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Melvin Michenaud (Learned C++ on his own in 4 months... his only fault is being easily distracted by Matthieu)
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Rigot Melvil (A fast printer of quality 3D mesh, as well as being an excellent bug finder)
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In addition, we were lucky enough to have a composer friend, Tom Zinck, who created the entire soundtrack for Glitch. Many thanks to him for his wonderful music.
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It's important to note that with a team of 6 people, we were all required, at one time or another, to perform tasks different from those for which we were trained.
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Personally, I took with conviction the role of team manager, for which I had never been trained, and Florian Breton put just as much energy into his sound design tasks.
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On this project, there were only the 6 of us, which isn't very many for such a large-scale project.
On the other hand, we all knew each other and got on quite well, which was a real strength throughout the year of production.
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Schematics and Game Design
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The game is made up of two phases, both got different artistic directions:
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Infiltration phase in which the player must activate buildings such as “catalysts”, which free some space to set up turrets during the tower defense phase.
During this phase, if he is spotted, he must hide from enemies.
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Medieval fantasy: Tower defense phase where the player can place turrets to protect the "Nexus". During this phase, other enemy drones specific to this phase appear.
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A more specific diagram shows the evolving behavior of a drone during the infiltration phase:
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Or an extract from the Excel table created to balance the various defenses to which the player has access during the tower defense phase.
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Finally, a curve showing the evolution of player emotions during a game of Glitch:
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This is just a small sample of the ideas, diagrams, tables and other plans created for Glitch.
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Good ideas
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Before getting into the problems of Glitch, let's mention a few design ideas I'm proud of.
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From a visual point of view, these two images show two versions of the world, and more specifically, two versions of a carpet.
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This seemingly simple carpet is a real landmark for the player. During the infiltration phase, it takes the form of a numerical line and links the player's various objectives together.
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During the tower defense phase, enemies follow the carpet to attack the Nexus.
It's simple, but the carpet is a source of information for the player in both phases of the game, without the player having to interact with it.
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If we dwell on something more complex than simple mats, one of Glitch's aims is that, in this tower defense, the player should be able to place turrets and other traps, but not attack in any way.
The challenge here was to find out what the player would do during these phases if he couldn't attack.
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One of the main dynamics of Glitch is movement, and the aim is for the player to move to place his turrets in one place, then move again to place his turrets in another place, and so on. In this way, instead of attacking, he places turrets.
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To achieve this result, several things had to be done:
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Firstly, the layout of the locations where you could place your turrets. We decided to frame the player and not let him build his turrets wherever he wished on the map.
If the turrets had been placed all over the place, the player would have had to remember where each turret was placed, and this would have ended up in a long, tedious and frustrating orienteering race.
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The second thing was to help the player find his way around, and instead of mats, we thought in terms of "Cocoons" (a place where several turret emplacements are located) which were systematically placed in the path of enemies and therefore close to the mats.
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These cocoons provided a framework for the player. He knew that he had to run from cocoon to another to place turrets, and if he got lost, all he had to do was follow the mats to redirect himself and inevitably arrive at a “Cocoon”.
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There are obviously plenty of other things I'm proud of on Glitch, but it would take a long time to explain them all to you.
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Art problem
One of our first problems was our art direction. Glitch has two worlds in one, a digital world dressed up with a medieval overlay.
For the medieval world, we quickly found where to go, but for the digital world, it took us longer.
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There were several ways of representing it. One of our first ideas was to do it very geometrically, with cold lights and reflective textures.
This didn't convince us, as there were too many differences between the medieval and digital worlds. On top of that, readability was complicated by the mirror effect.
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The other idea was to take inspiration from more abstract worlds, such as the Matrix movie or Cyberpunk 2077. Unfortunately, here too, legibility was a problem.
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All the research, the backtracking, the contradictions between worlds, etc., kept us on our toes for at least two months, and discouraged some of our team members as to their skills.
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It's important to understand that our teaching team and the school in general wanted to have a rendering as quickly as possible, and the pressure around art direction at that time was quite great.
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So we comforted the team members whose morale was low, and mobilized other members to support them in the task of researching and creating the art direction, in order to achieve this:
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Shader Problem
One shader in particular posed a problem for us.
Very quickly, we obtained a shader that allowed us to switch from the medieval world to the digital world, as shown in the video below:
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The problem was that in the original game design, there were several medieval zones in a digital world.
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Unfortunately, we couldn't duplicate this shader. It worked perfectly on its own, but we needed several medieval zones in a vast digital world, and therefore several shaders working simultaneously.
After several weeks of research, other members of the team became discouraged, and we abandoned the idea of having multiple shaders, even if it meant rethinking Glitch's game design.
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Personally, I'd rather the multiple shaders didn't come to fruition if it meant the whole team could get on with the project in peace.
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Narrative and Game Design problem
Glitch's aim was for its core mechanics to have a direct link with the narrative.
For example, the idea of different buildings having connections between them, like a veritable digital network, is something directly inspired by the narrative.
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This was done clumsily and partially in the final game. The explanation of the lore is done with blocks of text, it's optional, and almost no player understood the narrative plot.
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This problem arose from a desire to integrate a complex narrative with multiple reading levels into a project, integrating several complex mechanics into a short project.
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On the one hand, we succeeded in integrating the main narrative elements, but on the other, its accessibility is limited, so we're both satisfied and dissatisfied.
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Production Problems
Generally speaking, Glitch's game design was unfortunately under-exploited.
Much of the game design research, the rules of the game and the balancing of the various tower defense units could not be integrated.
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The reason for this is that Glitch's Game/Level/Narrative Design suffered many delays, as it had to make concessions in favor of other parts of the game which also had problems.
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Glitch's ambition was not scaled back, and the aim was to make a level worthy of a vertical slice for the final rendering. This didn't help, as the rules were complex for a new player to get to grips with.
So, right after a tutorial, the player is plunged into a level he's supposed to reach in several hours, and the result is that he's lost and it's too complex to assimilate so many rules in so little time.
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All in all, players enjoyed playing the game and were curious to discover Glitch in all its aspects. If we gave them a little help with the rules while they were playing, they were still able to get to grips with it and enjoy it, which made us very happy as creators.
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Because even if it's not perfect, the aim of a video game is still to have fun, isn't it?
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If I had to do it all over again?
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To avoid this kind of problem, the most basic solution would have been to reduce expectations on this project, by filtering the number of things to be done, which would have allowed the project to be less short-sighted and lead to a "cleaner" result.
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If the project had to be repeated, one thing is certain: a larger R&D phase would have been necessary.
This would have enabled all departments to carry out tests and several iterations in view of the project's ambition.
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For example, in the Game Design area, the challenge is to make two completely different gameplay phases coexist. This is a challenge, because currently, Glitch is content to have two phases that are played one after the other, and they don't respond to each other despite sharing resources.
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In any case, one thing is certain: in the course of producing Glitch, all team members have acquired experience and skills beyond what they could have imagined.
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Conclusion
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So, after this list of problems, things to review, etc., you might think that I'm only seeing the bad side of things, or that the project is a disaster.
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In truth, not at all. The project got a mark of around 18/20 from the teaching staff, who told us they were proud of what we'd managed to do. Personally, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, which is why I dwell on the flaws in what I create. I could list many more faults, but also many qualities about Glitch...
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This project has been, for ME, a great source of frustration, because I've seen a lot of things that need to be redone, rethought, etc. That's why, although it was completed in 2023, I don't mention it until 2024 in my portfolio. It took me a long time to accept the non-perfection of this project dear to my heart.
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But if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing! I'd be too afraid to spoil everything I'd gained from this magnificent project, of which I'm now very proud, and which confirmed something I'd begun to learn during my studies:
A video game is first and foremost a team !
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This project has strengthened the bonds of the Glitch team. Whatever problems we faced, we overcame together!
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The year we spent in production was an unforgettable one for all of us.
All I hope is that we'll get together again to create games together, and who knows, maybe Glitch will rise from its ashes…
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Thanks for reading.
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