Le Beau
Tambour
a musical narrative game
Le Beau Tambour was the main project that I worked on during my fourth year at Rubika SupinfoGame. It was an experimental take on narrative, text-based games, themed around music and emotions. The player controlled Grenouille, a drum-playing frog, that leads his small band of friends through the forest. As the band travels, the lovable crew meets new characters that they try to help thanks to Grenouille's amazing ability to transform music into emotions.
What I worked on for this project
Music and Sound design
Sound design was a crucial part of Le Beau Tambour's experience. We had to have sounds and music that reflected our game's warm and chill aesthetic. To achieve this, all of the sounds were recorded acoustically. Each character has his own voice that we tweaked in sound editing software to make our own version of Animal Crossing's animalese. And the music was composed and played by François Iakouchev and I. François mainly worked on the voices and some of the instruments' melodies with me, while I composed and played the main theme. You can click on the video on the right to listen to the main theme! I used an acoustic guitar, a melodica and some bongos.
Game and Ux Design
Le Beau Tambour, being very unique and experimental, was a real challenge to turn into a functional experience. The original concept stemmed from little more than visual representations of the troop, there was no gameplay idea or real intentions regarding the experience. We made about half a dozen different concepts for this game before landing on this original mix of narration and music. One of our main goals was to make this game super accessible to anyone, meaning that the game is very easy, and almost void of any hurdles. We really took children storybooks as our main reference. It had to be warm and charming. So the main gameplay loops were very simple, but the narration was deep and intriguing.
Creating Engaging
presentations
Since our game contained gameplay that doesn't really exist anywhere else, we had to make sure that our presentations and pitches were as clear as possible. I really took the time to make pretty documents with very clear diagrams and explanations. The video on the left shows the presentation that I made for the final jury of the project. We had to present it as a team in front of industry professionals.