My name is Edouard and I have been working in the video games industry since the year 2000, mostly in France but also in Holland. Nowadays I am mainly involved in Art Direction and Game Design for smartphone and tablet games, as a freelancer. My focus is games but not only, I also do apps or interactive books. I hope you will enjoy my portfolio and I would be glad to get in touch with you. Feel free to contact me if you have any opportunities you want to discuss. See the green buttons below to write a mail to me or review my Linkedin. (Note: most of the posts here show video footages of the games I have worked on, just click the Read More links to get the full pages and go check the bottom.)
My role on this project:
Pixel Art, Animation, Level Design
This project was my first collaboration with Kaolink studio. It was an adaptation of the console game. The game was inspired by one sequence where Crash, controlled by the player, must look after Cortex who is walking forward like a lemming. The whole gameplay is about triggering mechanisms in time to protect Cortex from being caught by traps.
SCREENSHOTS
I was in charge of creating most of the graphics of the game in several resolutions. Cortex and Crash sprites were already animated and almost done in terms of pixeal artwork, I only add to tweak them a bit. I was also involved in creating level design patterns and mount levels in the editor.
Some of the level design patterns I made for the game.
VIDEOS
Gameplay sequence from the console version and taken as reference to make the mobile game.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Romaric de Perier, Olivier Richez
Creative Direction: Philippe Tesson
Game Design: Philippe Tesson, Eléonore Gaczol
Level Design: Eléonore Gaczol, Edouard Albert
Art Direction: Stéphane Arson
Pixel Art: Stéphane Arson, Philippe Tesson, Edouard Albert
Producer: Eléonore Gaczol
My role on this project: Pixel art, Art Direction, Storyboard
Adi l'entraîneur was an educational game on DS I have worked on for Kaolink as a freelancer. The game was published by Mindscape who later took Kaolink studio over. Adi is a collection of educational titles that started on PC in the 90's and this project was its first adaptation on Nintendo DS.
ARTWORKS
The upper screen was dedicated to the dialogs between Adi, the main human character and his fluffy fellow Woops to guide the player throughout the lessons. The bottom touch screen was logically dedicated to all the interactions to do by the user, like connecting elements together or checking numbers.
Some animation mockups I made.
My first duty was to design and adapt the lessons based on the PC cinematics on dual screen of the device. Due to technical limitations and time production, it was quickly decided to not go for full animation cinematics but rather slight animated scenes made of key poses and facial expressions. Also I had to adapt the dialogs and cut them into digest sequences. In total I drew 12 storyboards to adapt the 12 lessons.
Storyboard sample.
Art-wise, I was in charge of Woops character. I made a set of elements for each parts of the body, focusing on the face elements. By enabling or disabling the elements as layers, we could create a wide range of expressions and poses.
I had to do a bit of art direction too, but it was not my primary role on the project.
SCREENS
PACKAGING
VIDEOS
Trailer.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Thierry Costa, Kyrié Humphrey, Maxime Crusson
Creative Direction: Philippe Tesson
Art Direction: Stéphane Arson, Edouard Albert
Art: Stéphane Arson, Philippe Tesson, Laetitia De Mesquita, Aurélie Lemaire, Edouard Albert
Producer: Walid Miled
My role on this project:
Art Direction, Pixel Art, Animation, Production
REVIEWS
Read the full review on Pocket Gamer
In 2008, I was hired by Playsoft as Art Director to work on MetalGear Acid². Tough it was an adaptation of a PSP game and also a sequel to a first opus made by another developer on mobile, this project was a real creation and the first one for Playsoft as a developer who so far was only porting and testing mobile games as a third party. The project was quite challenging for me since I was creating pixel art (half of the environments and most of the animated sprites), handling the art direction, the production and hiring new artists, all at the same time (hopefully I could share the producer role with someone else in the team when things became out of control for me). Not only the game was in multi resolutions but also using different technologies: the game had to be 2D and also 3D for the most powerful devices.
3D version screenshots.
3D models rendered. Each character was made of a few dozen of polygons. They all had to be redone from scratch since optimizing them would have eventually been more time consuming. Snake character has been done by Mathew Groen and the rest of the characters and props by Hadrien Gouedard.
The specifications for 3D models were really far from what we can do nowadays on smartphones, much more limited. We always had to find compromises between polycount and framerate. For instance, to prevent the textures from being stretched we had to increase the number of polygons but in the meantime polygons were slowing the display rate down...Given these very strong limitations, this project was quite of a technical challenge to achieve obviously !
My role on this project:
Art and Creative Direction, Pixel Art, Animation, Level Design, Production
This is one of the games I have been the most involved in and the most proud of. As many titles out at that time on mobile, it was based on a licence, which in this case was Largo Winch, a famous adventure comic book serie in french speaking countries. Two movies and a bunch of videogames have been made based on that brand so far.
SCREENSHOTS
Some level designs inputs prior to the level editor stage.
The idea I came with was to create an intense action game with some adventure ingredients, with various type of effects and based on some books of the serie:
3 side scroller levels based on platform and beath-them-all action ( in one level you also had to protect a character from taking damages as he would walk forward automatically). Regarding game mechanisms, I was clearly by Rolling Thunder an old arcade game from the 80's.
vertical automatic scroller levels with a speedboat chase in Venice canals. Games on java devices would not allow double inputs keypad, so that means you could only press only one key at a time. So in order to simplify the gameplay I decided to only control the directions of the boat and not allow shooting. The shooting could have been automatic, but I didn't want that. I rather preferred to based this sequence on dodging and escaping, I found this more thrilling. That being said, there was one way tro kill your enemies by pushing them on the side of the canal.
a helicopter chase. A bit similar to the boat levels regarding controls (for the same reasons), except that in this case there was no possibility at all to destroy the enemies. We had to find some tricks to give the feeling off lying at a high height on top of NY skyscrapers so the idea of using a fake 3d building, based on flat layers came. Also an inspiration from a game of the 80's, Thunder Blade.
A flyer was inserted in Dupuis comic books.
All in all, this project was fun and really motivating to do. Quite a challenge since the build of the game at to fit in 200k, a limit given by operators to sell the J2ME games on their platform at that time (it sounds ridiculous now with the 50 mo limit on iOS ...). A special thanks to Tomasz Wagner who did a great job as a coder, supporting more than 200 heterogenous devices and also doing a great job as a level designer on the chase sequences.
VIDEOS
2007 - Largo Winch - J2ME from Edouard Albert on Vimeo.
Gameplay trailer.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Tomasz Wagner, Reinier Van Vliet
Art: Edouard Albert, Matthew Groen
Creative Direction: Edouard Albert
Game Design & Level Design: Tomasz Wagner, Micah Hrehovcsik, Edouard Albert
Sound Design: Mike Clarke
Producer: Alberto Zarate-Guerra, Edouard Albert
My role on this project:
Art and Creative Direction, Level Design (car chase level), Production
Overloaded, in partnership with Micazook, did this game for Uclick who had the licence to make a mobile game based on the "TMNT" movie to be released (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), the first of the brand made in CGI.
SCREENSHOTS
On this project, I was mainly responsible for the creative and art direction. Matthieu Malot, a talented artist did all the graphics except the chase sequence's. On my side, I also did some production and QA with Micazook, the team developing the game in Poland. I did the entire level design of the chase sequence, which particularly got some good feedback in the reviews.
Regarding the game itself, we recycled a bit the mechanisms of Largo Winch, a game we were finishing at that time: mix of different types of gameplay, action with adventure elements. We added one cool feature: the possibility to switch during the game between turtles who had specific skills and abilities. I guess Lost Vikings influenced us at some point.
VIDEOS
Game Trailer.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Micazook
Art: Matthieu Malot, Matthew Groen
Art & Creative Direction: Edouard Albert
Game Design & Level Design: Matthew Groen, Micah Hrehovcsik, Micazook
Sound Design: Mike Clarke
Producer: Alberto Zarate-Guerra, Edouard Albert
My role on this project:
Creative direction, Pixel art, Level Design
The Untouchables is the game adaptation of the movie on mobile. The concept was to have a shooter game made of waves of gangsters shooting at the player from all over the screen. Enemies would slide in or pop in, either during scrolling moves or when the camera was still. There was also a russian-roulette minigame.
SCREENSHOTS
On this project I mainly did all the ingame pixel artwork as well as the creative direction. I also did some level design using an in house editor developed specifically for this game.
The intention was to progressively give a feeling of being surrounded like in the most intense action sequences of the movie. To do that, the first strong choice to do was to decide to not give a free control on the aiming cursor which would have been painful with a keypad but instead to divide the screen in a 9 cells grid with the same layout as the 9 digits of the keypad. This was allowing to not bother with precise aiming but rather focus on rythme and reflex.
VIDEOS
Game trailer.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Frank de Lange
Art Direction: Dan Parks
Creative Direction: Edouard Albert
Art: Dan Parks, Edouard Albert, Matthew Groen
Game Design & Level Design: Micah Hrehovcsik, Edouard Albert
Sound Design: Mike Clarke
My role on this project:
Art & Creative direction, Pixel art, 3D, Level Design
PIXEL ART
3D RENDERS
Overloaded acquired the licence to make mobile games around the animated serie called Funky Cops which revived the atmosphere of the blaxploitation period and with a lot of echoes with Starsky & Hutch too. One of the ideas was to make a pinball game which fitted perfectly with the vintage look of the brand. Thanks to the actual pinball cab that we had in the office ! We also made a few other titles based on the same brand: bowling, puzzle-games, arcade, table tennis,etc.
SCREENSHOTS
On this project I made the design of the user interface, adapted the pinball table layout, made the elements in 3D and polished the renders in 8bit pixel. I also level designed the minigames. One of my favorites was a LCD car mini game in which the player had to dodge cars coming toward the camera. On a game of that kind where physics and balls reaction are crucial, the layout of the table had to change many times. To handle this I kept a relationship between the meshes I modeled in 3d and the splines I formerly drew prior to the extrusion of the shapes. This way, if I had to change a corridor or a wall, I just had to change a few points of the 2D lines and render the table objects again. Bumpers like elements could just be just repositioned without touching the modeling at all.
PROCESS
Ger van der Neut, the lead developer, did a great editor in Java so all the physic parameters could be changed in realtime in a wireframe version of the table. I wish we could have spent more time designing the minigames but all in all it was a fun project to do and the result was quite good given the limitations of the platform.
VIDEOS
Game trailer.
Animated serie the game is adapted from.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Gert Van der Neut, Reinier Van Vliet
Art Direction: Dan Parks
Art: Edouard Albert, Matthew Groen
Game Design & Level Design: Micah Hrehovcsik, Edouard Albert
My role on this project:
Art & Creative direction, Pixel art (characters, props & animation)
This mobile game was made for Uclick who got the rights of the cartoon serie "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward" which features the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the future.
On this project I did all the character animations, the car sprites. I also did the art and creative direction. The budget was not that high so the idea was to find a gameplay that did not require a lot of level design work nor a lot of contents amount, by mainly using loops and recycling patterns that motivate the player to beat hiscores.
There were two types of sequences:
- a side view arena which layout is made by two floor levels. A turtle which the player would have chosen, would have to face waves of enemies coming from the sides and the upper platform by defending in each side in time. The turtle would have to remain in place not being able to escape from its position. Combos would give some bonuses.
- a side scroller sequence would let the player control a turtle running and falling on platforms made of futuristic cars which would move up and force the player to prevent from being caught up by the scrolling. This level was inspired by the traffic jam sequence in the "5th element" movie.
SCREENSHOTS
VIDEOS
Game trailer made by Matthew Groen.
The actual animated serie.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Yacine Fattahi, Frank de Lange
Art: Edouard Albert, Matthew Groen
Creative Direction & Art Direction: Edouard Albert
Game Design & Level Design: Micah Hrehovcsik
Sound Design: Mike Clarke
Producer: Edouard Albert
My role on this project:
Pixel art (including animation), Level design and Gamedesign (in collaboration with Micah Micah Hrehovcsik).
Overloaded was contracted to make an advergame for a campaign featuring a new model of shoes. The game had to be based on a clip which was in final stage of production. The game had to be pitched and developed in a very short time: 2 months. Hopefully since the clip structure and rythme was based on a ride, following the chase of a character, the game could easily use the same principles: run and obstacles. The goal of the game was to run trough the environments in the best chrono as possible. There were 3 platform level heights. Controls were really simple: automatic run, one key to lean, one to jump. The character could bump to static obstacles like walls, branches, and sign panels or moving obstacles like birds or bears. He could also fall into holes. He also had to jump to reach higher platforms.
SCREENSHOTS
The obstacles were taken from the video clip: urban objects, forest elements, wild animals, etc...For some reasons, to make it short: because of the animation cycle and the speed of the screen scrolling, the character could only jump using the same leading foot. That meant that the obstacles such as holes and platform edges could only be placed on, let say, odd numbered tiles (but it could be even number's I don't remember actually).
Shots from the actual Adidas video commercial.
The game was made in 2005, a few years before Canabalt or Edge. So even the gameplay was not as deep as these great references, we were at least the first to my knowledge to make a game based on leaps and stunts in an urban environment !
VIDEOS
2005 - Adidas Challenge - J2ME from Edouard Albert on Vimeo.
Gameplay trailer.
The actual commercial which we created the game from.
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Reinier Van Vliet, Ferry Spierring
Art: Edouard Albert, Dan Parks, Matthew Groen
Creative Direction: Dan Parks
Game Design & Level Design: Micah Hrehovcsik, Edouard Albert
Producer: Ferry Spierring
My role on this project:
Art & Creative direction, Pixel art, Production
Redbull Flugtag is a competition event organized and sponsored by Redbull in several cities in the world (redbullflugtagusa.com). In 2006 an edition was held in Rotterdam. Overloaded was hired to make the advergame for mobiles. The goal of this game was to beat the hiscores by going as far possible and compare them, controlling a silly aircraft the player could customize with various types of hand made elements, like in the real event.
I really enjoyed designing all the aircrafts in pixel art, it was really fun to do, matching all the aircraft components together and figuring out all the customization possibilities the player could try out.
SCREENSHOTS
The controls were very simple: one thumb pressure to fly up. This game was designed in 2006 way before the iPhone era : the controls and the games mechanisms appeared to be the right design choices when we see the success of more recent games such as Jet Pack Joy Ride...
VIDEOS
2006 - Redbull Flugtag - J2ME from Edouard Albert on Vimeo.
Trailer made by me.
How the actual event looks like :)
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✪ TEAM ✪
Code: Adrian Kurek
Art and Creative Direction: Edouard Albert
Pixel Art: Edouard Albert, Matthew Groen
Game Design: Micah Hrehovcsik
Sound Design: Andrew Lemon
