Aurore and the crystal shard

Aurore and the crystal shard is a retro-platformer inspired puzzle game. Take control of Aurore, a young girl who got struck by a mysterious lightning. You can’t move, but your hand can take the power from others…When an enemy gets in range, look for a purple circle above its head and press A or Q to SWITCH power between you and your target. Then manipulate them by giving them powers to move or jump ! Solve puzzles with enemies!

• Game / Level Designer and programmer
• It’s in the top 200 of a 5,328 entries game jam
• Developed in 48 hours
• Used Unity
• Team of 2 persons

Aurore and the crystal shard was my first official international game jam. I did it with CMBT Studio as part of a training for my first year of master.

I was a game designer and level designer on this project and I had CMBT as graphic artist. The Jam’s theme was “out of control” so we decided on a puzzle game where you lose the ability to control your character by giving this ability to enemies. You could also take it back or exchange it with another ability like jumping.

The idea was then to create clever puzzles about bringing your enemies to a specific location to activate buttons and open the next part of the adventure. Using a pixel style level design, it was really simple to visualise levels and then bring them to life with a tile based system in Unity.

Yellow pixels are limits where the AI could run, Blue is our character, Purple are enemies, green is the exit and red are the pressure plates opening the exit.

This game has a simple yet efficient concept that made it easy for us to generate levels and concentrate on the aesthetic. We managed to make 3 working levels in 48 hours being only 2 and programming not being our specialty.

We were blown away by the responses Aurore got. We managed to be in the top 200 out of 5430 games created. That was the first time we truly saw the power of a game jam at work, being our first official game jam. Even if this game wasn’t one of the winners of the jam we took it as a big achievement.

We created lots of other titles in jams after that, but nothing came as close as this one yet. It still has a lot of potential to work with and we planned on making it a full release someday. This was one of the best game jams we did and I’m glad I did it with CMBT Studio, who has been an amazing partner on this exercice.

I’m definitely looking forward to make more game jams in the future.