Game Design - La Veste et le Choléra
Information :
La veste et le choléra is a game created during the "Les Rendez-vous de l’Histoire" game jam, a major event in France dedicated to history, bringing together historians, researchers, and artists to make this discipline accessible to the public.
With my historical background and my desire to combine my passion for video games with History, it felt natural for me to take part in this event. Over the course of three days, our team developed an educational game that won the Jury Grand Prize and was even featured in a newspaper article.
This distinction, of which the entire team is particularly proud, confirms that my professional project and my vision of video games as a tool for historical transmission can resonate with an audience. It further strengthens my motivation to continue pursuing this path.
Data :
7
Person involved in our Teams
during the GameJams
3 days
Godot
Game Engine use
Objectives :
La veste et le choléra aims to propose an educational game intended for the public around the theme of hygienism in Lyon during the 19th and 20th centuries. We therefore thought, as a team, about how to translate this historical subject into a game.
The idea moved toward a game inspired by what Plague Inc. and Frostpunk propose, in which the player embodies a decision-maker responsible for making political and social choices. Through dialogues and strategic decisions to make the city of Lyon modern, while avoiding both population dissatisfaction and the spread of diseases caused by bad decisions.
It's a game of balance. The player’s objective is to reach historical reality, while avoiding bad decisions that can lead to disastrous alternative endings.
Narrative Design :
La veste et le Choléra is above all a narrative game, it was necessary to write coherent, clear, and realistic texts, while maintaining the objective of making it an educational game.
This is why we created an Excel document gathering all of the game’s dialogues, as well as the possible player choices and their consequences. This document also specifies the appearance of events and their timing, as each location and date on the map has a particular importance in order to ensure the historical accuracy of the game.
Finally, we implemented a value system associated with each event, each one having a unique ID (detailed later).
This clear and structured system notably allowed effective communication between the programming and design teams, and contributed to completing the project within the given timeframe.
System Design
As mentioned previously, the game is based on a system of choices leading to consequences. Each decision made by the player is therefore associated with a value system.
Given the existence of multiple possible endings, it was necessary to design a precise system design, allowing the player to reach all the different endings and to remain fully immersed in their choices, with each action potentially having positive or negative consequences.
In order to avoid designing this system design directly in the engine, which would have been time-consuming for the programmers, we created an Excel simulation gathering all the possible score outcomes achievable in the game. This step then allowed us to integrate precise and coherent values into the engine, ensuring an immediate and balanced functioning of the system.
Although this phase of work was complex, it proved to be very enriching and, above all, made it possible to deliver, at the end of the game jam, a fully playable game, correctly parameterized thanks to this simulation.