Jens Fillée

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Practical Info

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About The Project

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"Who Let Him Cook" is a the result of a game jam I participated in together with some friends during the summer break. The theme of this game jam was "roles reversed", so we ended up creating a silly cooking game where you are the ingredient (a sausage). In the game, the chef is mindlessly adding & mixing ingredients and it's up to you to make the best of the recipe by slamming out unwanted ingredients.

My most notable responsibility was the food & recipe system. This includes things like spawning the food and creating the recipes, but also tracking which foods are in the pan and indicating whether they do or don't belong in the recipe via the UI.

What I Learned

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As this was the first team-based game project I ever worked on, I learned quite a bit from the experience. I learned how to work with scriptable objects in Unity, but also how to collaborate using Git & GitHub in a Unity-context as well as Miro for quick brainstorming or clarification of certain features.

Aside from that, due to the tight time limit (48 hours), it was also a great exercise in dealing with time pressure.

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Practical Info

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About The Project

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For this assignment, we were tasked with simply creating a fun game conept. That's it. No constraint other than the fact that it had to be singleplayer and playable with a controller. The emphasis here was on iteration, documenting your design process and writing a full game design document.

The concept I came up with, "Twisted Tethers", is a game where you play as the spirit of a puppeteer, fighting and controlling possessed string-puppets. My mission with this game, was to craft an intriguing world filled with eerie puppets that not only delivers heart-pounding bullet-hell combat with a twist, but also subtly conveys an underlying message all about self-discovery and independent decision-making.

What I Learned

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I had a lot of fun with the freedom this assignment offered and it's because of that freedom, I managed to find a method of brainstorming and drawing conclusions from playtests & feedback that works really well for me personally. Aside from that, I obviously also learned a lot about what goes into writing a good game design document.

All in all, while I do think this current prototype still has its flaws, the overarching concept definitely shows potential and I would love to come back to it at some point.

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Practical Info

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What Is Fathomless Waters?

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Fathomless Waters is a card-based strategy game all about arranging powerful swarms of strange creatures by trying to satisfy their transformation conditions, while doing the opposite to your enemies.

Design Breakdown

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At its core, this game is about dealing with an daunting, overwhelming task.

It's about how sometimes life often throws such seemingly insurmountable tasks at you that it just seems hopeless. But it also aims to showcase that if take a moment to stop & actually look at the smaller parts that make up that monstrous task and tackle these parts one at a time, eventually you'll realize that that big insurmountable task has whittled down to something much, much more manageable.

Below, I highlighted a few ways in which the design of Fathomless Waters reflects this idea.

Getting Swarmed

At the start of an encounter, a huge swarm of unfamiliar, scary-looking organisms starts forming before the player. It starts fairly small & you think "Ok, that's not so bad", but then a lot more of them come in and you quickly start feeling overwhelmed & intimidated. Both because of the sheer amount of them, but also due to the fact that each creature also brings quite a bit of information along with it (points number, condition, effect, …).

Too Many Attacks

Another way the player will really feel like he is getting overwhelmed, is the fact that he often can't fully prevent all the enemy swarm's attacks. At the beginning, any decision will look like a “bad decision” because the player will still be taking hits (that's just unavoidable). The enemy swarm is simply too big, too overpowering, compared to the player's ability to combat it.

But he must work with what he has, focus on what he CAN do and settle on decisions, even if they aren't perfect. And by doing so, slowly, attack after attack, he will start to see the enemy swarm get reduced to something more manageable & grow more & more confident in his ability to defeat it.

One Mutating Critter At A Time

This is what the main gameplay of Fathomless Waters is all about: taking a step back & looking at the individual elements (whether it be enemies or your own creatures) and their conditions and then working out a strategy from there.

For example: The player hovers over each of the attacking enemies to figure out which of his cards they are targeting in order to then decide which card is the most vital to his deck & thus which enemy to prioritize attacking. He then looks at his own cards & experiments with them to see if it's doable to both make his way to that enemy & piece together enough attack power to deactivate (or destroy) it this turn.

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Practical Info

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What Is CU_PID?

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CU_PID is a top-down puzzle game all about coupling the right people through satisfyingly perfect sequences of ricochet-inducing shots.

It was made during my second year studying Digital Arts & Entertainment as an end assignment for the Game Design 3 course.

Design Breakdown

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CU_PID is meant to be about perfectionism and the dangers of a "never good enough" mentality. That's why the game does everything it can to make the player feel like a plotting perfectionist, trying to come up with & execute a plan just right. One little imperfection and he should immediately want to rewind & try it again, but better. But once he does execute his plan exactly as he had it in his mind, he should feel excited & satisfied. Though that sense of satisfaction will be quite short-lived, because soon after a new "imperfection" will arise again.

Below, I discuss a few elements in CU_PID's design that help to invoke this feeling.

The Perfect Sequence

In CU_PID the player only has a limited amount of arrows and each arrow can be used for multiple purposes: from shooting an NPC forward through a direct hit, to repositioning yourself, or even grazing multiple NPCs, launching them in perpendicular directions. That means a lot of thinking, trying & quick restarting in order to find the perfect sequence of shots that meets all desires & completes the level.

And even after finding what he thinks could be the solution, the player still needs to be able to execute it perfectly (with the exact timing & precise aiming it requires), likely taking up quite a few attempts as well.

It Never Ends

In CU_PID, the goal of each level is to couple all NPCs in a way that's in line with the desires of each & every one of them. However, upon completing a level, one of the NPCs will realize they didn't actually like who they were with & change their desires. As a result, Cupid will have to rewind & do it all again, but differently this time. This cycle repeats multiple times for each situation (level layout) & progressively more times the further the player gets in the game.

New desires will always keep popping up. Just like how, if you don't stop yourself & say "this is good enough", you will always be finding new things that you feel you really need to change, but in reality, are nowhere close to as important as your mind makes them out to be.

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Practical Info

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What Is Shrouded Cliffs?

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Shrouded Cliffs is a stylized environment artwork, depicting a world of crumbling cliffs & thin, rocky pillars emerging from mysterious fog filled with harrowing creatures.

It came to be during my studies at Digital Arts & Entertainment as the result of the final assignment for the Game Art 3 course, but I fell in love with the setting and started working on further fleshing out the world behind it as well as a game concept taking place within it.

World Design Breakdown

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My goal with this concept is turn it into a game all about hanging in there, even when it feels like everything is out to get you. About surviving in a world where everything wants you dead and you're always just barely surviving on the last of your resources.

Below is a little introduction to the story behind the world, told from the perspective of a leading figure among the people of the Plateaus, a group of rocky "islands" emerging from the Fog.

Story Sample

This planet wants us dead.

Everything in this place is just dying to get their hands on us. From the thick, noxious fog to the nightmarish creatures that make it their home, to the nightmarish creatures that don't and decided to make their nests up in the mountain peaks instead. And they're all after the same thing: those damn Mistblossoms.

But the worst part is, we're no different. We need them, we crave them. Just like those creatures crave them to satisfy their never-ending appetite, if it weren't for those fruits, we wouldn't survive a week in this place. Our Pollinators, our Towers, everything runs on whatever it is that's inside those godforsaken clusters of thorns & lights.

Now normally, this is the part where I would say "Luckily they grow back almost disturbingly quickly and through collaboration & careful planning, we've actually managed to make ourselves as much of a home as is possible in a place like this". But lately we've barely been getting any Blossoms in the Upper Layers, leaving Ronan & the rest of the Harvesters with no choice but to rappel further & further down with each passing day. You won't hear them complain, yet I can't image they're thrilled to be attending funeral ceremonies of their men what feels like every other day at this point.

There's a lot of theories going around about what could be causing the scarcity. Some say the Fog has grown too thick, others say the weather has gotten too cold. Heck, there's even people who think the planet is alive and that now it's caught some kind of disease. Honestly, I wish they were right. Then maybe we could just throw a hot cup of tea and a warm blanket into the Rift and there you go, crisis averted. All I know is, morale is at an all-time low and we've been at the last of our food supply for weeks. And if things don't get better soon, not knowing why we got into this mess is going to be the least of our troubles.

So yes, alive or not, I can't deny this planet wants to be rid of us. The only question is: how much longer before we just let it?

Technical Execution

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The Game Art assignment consisted of creating a stylized environment in Unity HDRP. We were given a lot of freedom, with our only real requirements being to make use of modular assets, a custom shader and vertex painting.

The focus was more so on creating an interesting overall concept/scene (with a good composition, colors, etc.), rather than the perfect execution of the individual parts.

What I Learned

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I think the most valuable thing I learned from this project is related to time management. We were encouraged to make a thorough planning for the assignment and that's exactly what I did. Through time estimations & time-tracking, I managed to get a better understanding of how long things take me personally and learned to plan & adapt accordingly.

On the technical side of things, I learned a lot about creating shaders using Unity's Shader Graph and optimizing your scene for performance (using static batching & LODs).