From February 2021, the OEngine development team was progressively deployed on a major project: porting the engine to the new consoles of Sony and Microsoft released a few months earlier.

Made in parallel with the development of the game The Smurfs – Mission Vileaf, the initial goal of this port was to allow the game to be released on PS5 and Xbox Series. But this port will also benefit all current and future games made with OEngine, which can be published on these consoles!

This enormous task allowed me to get my hands in many facets of engine development: configuration and generation of Visual Studio projects, implementation of TRCs (technical requirements checklist), and even some rendering programming.

Continuation of OEngine development (from June 2019 to June 2020), this article covers the period from July 2020 to February 2021, corresponding to the first half of the development of The Smurfs – Mission Malfeuille.

The Smurfs – Mission Vileaf is the fourth and last project I had the opportunity to be part of during my adventure at OSome Studio, from June 2020 to October 2021.

Following my work on Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 and Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered, I was in charge of conceiving the system used to create and execute the cutscenes, as well as developing and maintaining various tools necessary for the production of the game.

Within the OEngine development team, I had the opportunity to be involved in the creation of the projects which are made with this engine: directly for Asterix & Obelix XXL 3 and Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered developed by OSome Studio, but also indirectly for Curse of the Dead Gods developed by Passtech Games.

My role was to help each member of the team to work in the best possible conditions: from the improvement of the editor’s tools (3D view, manipulators, cutscene, UI…), to user support (various bugs and crashes fixes).

During this period, I also developed a texture atlas system to improve the performance of Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered, and contributed to the Android port of White Night, carried out in partnership with Playdigious.

Developed by OSome Studio and published by Microids, Asterix & Obelix XXL Romastered is the remaster of the game of the same name released on November 21, 2003, on PS2. A game that I played a lot at the time (on its PC version)! It’s therefore with great pleasure that I contributed to the development of this ’romastered’ version, over the period from October 2019 to June 2020.

I was responsible for setting up and maintaining the tools necessary for the smooth running of the production, from restarting to maintaining the original game editor, as well as the creation and improvement of existing tools (like a C++ plugin for Maya and other Python scripts). I also worked on the development of the retro mode and on the general tweaking post-release of the game, among other things.

I had the opportunity to join the development of Asterix & Obelix XXL 3. Initially integrated into the project as Tools Programmer to technically assist the production of the cutscenes, I have finally been charged to create the 54 game cutscenes, under the direction of the lead animator.

This project was also the occasion for me to meet OEngine, proprietary game engine of OSome Studio: both as programmer (creation/improvement of features for the cutscenes editor), and also as user (cutscenes production).

Big fan of Splatoon, I trained to reproduce the paint of the game. I took advantage of the opportunity to experiment the Unreal Engine 4. The result is visible in the video above.