Presentation

The About page that’s been there for years describes a limited picture of who maintains this website and why it exists in the first place, that’s why I decided to tell you its story, from its beginnings to this day.

All the articles on this site already give you an idea of what I did in my professional life, games I made in my free time, and even a few school projects, but nothing yet explains how we came up to this. Let’s go back a little while.

A glimpse of our careers

While still in computer engineering school around 2012, I decided to show the projects I was the most proud of, be it school projects or personal ones, through a website. Some articles from back in the day, like this small Q-Learning implementation, are still here. I hosted it whith the help on one of the school’s associations, using their already-installed PHP server.

Shortly after my school education ended, I’ve been lucky enough to find a position in my first video game studio, which at the time was porting or re-creating ancient PC adventure games to mobile devices. I had to script entirely one of these games, port their in-house engine to Android then the Nintendo Switch, be involved in creating new games and some more projects...

I was so satisfied by this job that I didn’t feel the need to brag about it here anymore or even keep working on my personal projects. Then the tide had turned - game ports were not and important part of the company, it was getting rid of the best people or they were leaving by themselves, management was criticizable -, therefore I went back to my personal projects, both to try to earn a living out of them some indeterminate time ahead and to fill my portfolio some more to apply elsewhere.

I ended up updating this website and improving its design, first using Hugo - which I recommend - then using my own static site generator which I ended up writing, made specifically for this website. I added some more articles about my personal projects I had made by then, most notably game jam games, as well as professional projects I was the most proud of, for which I wanted to remember how they went.

In 2015, Biiscuit joinded me and brought her artist experience and skills with her, and to this day she helps me with the visual side of games. She designed the little people you can see in a few of our games and who add a lot of personality, despite their simplicity. Before that I was ready to release Fire Exit, a jam game from 2018, with only simple and static stickmen.

Game jams

In 2010, I joined the first "Game Development Week-end" sur hosted on the forums of the French website Developpez.com. I managed to successfully deliver something only the following year. It was a Java game, the language I was the most confortable with at the time, inspired by Prince of Persia and Flashback.

It is the only game jam I still get into every year, because after every hard-working week-end - between ambitious ideas that turn out more complicated than expected, engine flaws to fix in the middle of the jam, underestimated content creation time - , I say to myself "never again" until the next year.

I then waited 2014 to successfully release something at the end, with Cara Cara Carambar. A game that seemed salable to me if I added a lot more content, at least with my eyes back in the day. This time, I made in with my homemade C++ engine, which only supported OpenGL 3.0 at the time, therefore it failed to run on a number of machines.

After that point, I took part in this game jam every year using my engine, improving it step by step, and learning the lessons of what caused me trouble during each jam, like the fact I didn’t have a 3D collision system ready in 2016 for an underwater adventure game, or having a half-baked model loader in 2022. Most years, I didn’t resist the urge to improve the game after the jam.

Today, my engine allows me to release a game pretty easily, whatever idea crosses my mind, and some systems are easy enough to use that I can deploy them during the jam (like a simple localization system), others allow me to "optimize" the game for a later release (AssetBanks, serialization... which I’ll probably develop in a futur article).
Almost every game got its article on this website, either in the Projects page for some, or the Misc page for others.

What to do now

I’m glad that we managed to release a game almost every year, even with their flaws, that my engine is getting better and better, and that releasing a new game each year is getting easier and easier.

But my original goal was to be more ambitious, to release "big" full games we could be proud of, and get a living ou of them if possible.

With my flaw of getting a passion for every game we release and improving them over and over, I realized we were having a nice little catalogue of interesting games, which we could offer you in pleasant condition: update them so they would always be compatible with current computers, and add a launcher that would allow you to read a description of them and launch them...

That’s why we will launch Plisitol Jam Collection as soon as we can through itch.io, our games compilation that will allow you to "live" part of the story written here.

I’ve been wishing to spend my days working on games for a long time, whether they’re mine, made by a studio I’m part of or a client. And even though circumstances have made me happy to work as part of an external team, today I get more pleasure working on my projects, and I see this compilation as an occasion to share my work with you, in a more professional way than usual.