Mesmer

OUT NOW ON STEAM

I worked on Mesmer as part of my first professional experience at Rain Games, in Norway. Mesmer is a strategy game centered around social interactions, and set in the same universe as Teslagrad and World To The West, the studio's 2 previous games.

The Art Director's elevator pitch for this game is "Dishonored but in an Animal Crossing way", which I quite like.

I was hired as a Technical Designer intern, but in the end I worked on a lot of aspects of the game, from pure Game Design to Tool Programming to UX Design. I had the opportunity to design the UI of the internal animation tool, which confirmed my thoughts about the importance of well-thought tools to work efficiently in a project. It also strengthened my will to work in this field in the future. Working on Mesmer was challenging in many ways, as I have never worked with such a complex and complete gameplay framework. Moreover, some core features of Unity were rebuilt from scratch, such as the Navigation and Input systems. All of this made me feel like I was rediscovering Unity.

Working in such a small team (8 people) gave me lots of responsibilities and freedom, I did not hesitate to dig around in the backend to extend the possibilities of the powerful in-house tools we used. Working on complex non-gameplay code was definitely out of my comfort zone but it was very rewarding to be able to unlock new potential for gameplay content.

The game has been released on Steam and there is even a demo that you can play.

What I did

  • UI / UX Design for in-game content and the engine
  • Tool and Gameplay Programming
  • Game Design and AI Design
  • Integration

What I learnt

  • Designing UI for engine tools
  • Working with a complex, professional framework
  • Writing code according to strict guidelines
  • Working in a professional working environment