The competition
The game was made for the Ubisoft Gamelab Competition. Every team had 10 weeks to build a game prototype that has to respect the theme and many constraints. This year, the theme was "spectacle". The principal constraint required that the game includes a mechanic allowing spectators to interact with the game.

Many team went with a Twitch integration. We decided to do something else. We built a mobile application within Unreal for Android. Spectators could log in this application and select a game to watch. The concept of our game was that the player has to play the story told by a woman and every time the player has a new quest, the branching was chosen by spectators and it was "seemless" to the player. When the vote was completed by a spectator, the player heard a feedback which was the children who were listening the story adding parts to the story.

Our inspiration
Our principal inspiration was the game Vind (available on itch). We fell in love with their concept of playing a human that can transforms into a bird. We decided to create our on version of this concept and adding a story to it. We put a lot of hours during the development of this prototype and we also had to go to school.

Development
This is a short list of the weeks to summarize our process of development

1.  Discussing about game design and concepts
2.  Discussing about game design and concepts 
3.  We divided our team in 2 teams of 2 programmers and we built 2 quick prototypes in 3 days to be able to test 2 different concepts. We implemented an early prototype of Aziel proving that the mechanic of transformation was fun to play. YouTube: Aziel early prototype
4. Voted for Aziel (project name Auriel) and started a new project in C++ from scratch. Started a mobile project in parallel.
5. Transformation mechanics, Mixamo placeholder animations, Quest, Interaction and dialog system.
6. VFX speed, 3C (AutoCamera), UI (Compass, quest logs)
7. Art integration and Audio integration (until the end)
8. AI (Boss, Bird autopilot, Flock: was implemented in the early prototype)
9. Menu, game loop, quest finalization
10. Polish, Cinematics, Subtitles

Result
Our game was nominated in the category: Challenge and innovation. This was our only nomination. The teams of judges were composed by two employees of Ubisoft. They had only 10 minutes to test and evaluate each game. We think that the major problem of our game was that no judge have been able to complete the game, since they shared the controller. We had to use our cheat to skip the whole game until the final boss. 

We observed that most of the winning and nominated games were "mini party games". Those games were so polish and easy to take in hand. The learning curve was about 1 minute. We could see many of those game at the end of a Mario Party tour. Our first concept would have been like this, but we all wanted to build an adventure game. Last year, the result was similar, the best prototype was a party game mainly inspired by Overcook. We also took too much time to choose our concept and start the real project. 

I hope you enjoy the game. If you have any question about how we implemented a feature (except the skybox isn't ours) you can contact me: jeanrenechoiniere@gmail.com

A video of the development progression will be available soon.