Shawn Bergeron

Veneficium is hands-down my best achievement to date.

It consists of a stealth and survival horror experience, and it was developed over the course of seven months by a team of twelve artists and seven audio engineers.

The player incarnates a young witch who inadvertently summons the spirits of her deceased sisters while scouring the woods in search of her lost grandmother. She now has to stealthily make her way through the forest without alerting her rampaging creation, and she will have to gather plants and animal organs in order to cast spells, allowing her to slip past her enemies.

The original plan was to create five different levels hosting creatures linked to the five human senses, but for various reasons (including very tight deadlines), we settled on polishing a complete experience for the first level instead, and we shipped the product on Steam as a demo rather than a full game.

For this project, I wore many hats. My roles were those of producer, team manager, programmer, technical artist and audio integrator. I willingly took on these multiple responsibilities with the intent to learn as much as I could before completing my bachelor's degree.

As the lead producer, I became very familiar with different project and team management tools like Perforce, Hansoft, Notion and Shotgun. We implemented various principles of the Agile development pipeline, and we maintained an organic design documentation throughout the production.

As the only team member with prior programming experience, I naturally took on the role of solo programmer. Since I wasn't already familiar with Unreal Engine's Blueprint language, I took it as an opportunity to learn on top of everything else.

We originally intended the project to have very few programming challenges for that very reason, but we still had to massively rescope the original idea when we reached the alpha build. The creature and its behavior are also the result of my first AI design experience.

For this project, the audio integration was realized with Wwise, but credit for the audio design itself goes to the talented team from the University of Montreal which collaborated with us.

Check it out on Steam, if you dare!

Broken was completed in about half a day, split across a few weeks. It was the main project realized in our level design course.

The idea was to create a prototype for a small, contained world with a key / locked door design approach. We decided to give ourselves an extra challenge by focusing on the verticality of the level.

The player incarnates a golem which wakes up at the bottom of a relatively large cavern. Their objective is to make their way up to the exit by gathering power cores scattered around the level, which unlocks additional abilities that allow them in turn to progress further and clear increasingly difficult platforming challenges.

While my teammate and I split the initial design workload equally between ourselves, my focus for the development was more on the level environment itself and less on the player controller (which was programmed by my teammate).

We set-up a gym environment to fine-tune the player's ability values and properly establish our metrics, and once those were set, I started working on the level itself.

I had to come up with various platforming challenges, and I figured each power-up could be used not only as a way to reach the next sections of the level, but also as a sort of checkpoint, allowing the player to take alternate routes to come back should they fall down a pit.

Once the level was entirely grayboxed and color-coded to differentiate the challenges, I added a few finishing touches with a bit of lighting to clearly indicate the path forward.

Fractured is our first attempt at an open world-type game, which was realized in the scope of a three-day game jam.

The player was thrown into a small world with 4 biomes surrounded by mountains, and was free to select the order in which he could access them.

Each of the three biomes surrounding the "final area" hid a special gemstone (a key) and featured a visible pedestal (a keyhole) guarded by a powerful monster.

With all three stones in place, an elevator is unlocked in the final area which allows the player to reach the final encounter.

Many health pickups are hidden throughout the land. Exploring and searching for these as well as the gemstones is thus rewarding since it's the only way to restore health.

I did a lot of programming for this game, and I got to explore Unity's Mecanim animation system while integrating sounds and visual effects.

As this was a research project, I had to focus my efforts on the music aspect of the game. My main goal was ultimately to make an interactive and dynamic soundtrack that would react to the player's actions. In the final version of the game, each biome had its own track, and fight events would add a layer of intense drums to whatever music was playing. I achieved a smooth modulation by keeping a constant harmony throughout the pieces and changing or adding instruments based on the player's behavior. By starting all tracks at the same time, I only had to lower and raise the volumes of the desired tracks. The transition felt smooth enough, but for my next projects I'll definitely try and get inspired by newer ideas of sound design, for instance in games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017) which achieve an effect that is much more enjoyable (in my opinion) by including large elements of silence that add subtlety to all musical interventions.

File(s) unavailable at the moment.

Fae Circle is an atmospheric low-poly exploration game comprised mostly of fetch quests.

The player, a púca, wakes up in the morning in the middle of a forest. A trail leads to a nearby village, and the player soon realizes that they are invisible to the villagers.

Upon eavesdropping while wandering through the village, a few quests can be activated, requiring the player to explore the rest of the small island in order to find the necessary ingredients to combine in one of the nearby fae circles scattered throughout.

The outcome of these crafting recipes will allow the player to choose different courses of action, all of which have a positive or negative impact on the villagers, which affects the main scenario.

A huge amount of effort went into the visuals, and the game shipped complete with rigged meshes, animations and VFX. Unfortunately, the game is mostly unplayable in its current state, as we lacked the time to fix most game-breaking bugs by the end of our deadline. A lack of knowledge about LODs also caused many issues in terms of FPS, and it would definitely be something to implement should we consider revisiting this project.

Once more, I was in charge of the music and the sound effects, but I also integrated all the assets into Unity, worked on the map and the environment design, coded a few shaders and particle systems and added post-processing to the final build.

File(s) unavailable at the moment.

"Ever wanted to have a bar fight, but with guns, asteroids and no gravity? Well now you're in luck!"

Space Bar is a quirky anti-gravity local multiplayer brawler for a minimum of two players, up to four.

At the start of the game, characters are equipped with a weak fire extinguisher that acts as a means of traveling the small arena.

As time goes by, weapon pickups enable players to push each other in an attempt to make their adversaries fall off the stage. Since every action has an equal opposite reaction, every player is also just as likely to push themsleves off the map if they act with careless planning.

Every so often, a meteor flies through the stage, shoveling most of the debris (and players) off the stage in its wake.

As this was my first game jam project, I was asked to do simple tasks like the level art and the soundtrack, which you can listen through the music tab. I also drew the background and most of the props.

If you own at least one friend and two Xbox controllers, give it a try!