Area Effect
I founded Area Effect in 2011 after I left Ubisoft to work on different projects. I didn’t have a plan or even a product to sell, it was a new start. From there I worked on independant games and apps for 10 years, from mobile and PC games to serious games, game design gigs or augmented reality apps. It was a small studio where I was the only engineer, hiring freelancers and short term contractors to help me with art and design.
As I was the only engineer I spent (at least) half my time on development mostly in Unity, but I also was in charge of everything else. From finding business leads, joining trade shows, recruitment, contracts and legal affairs, art direction, game design, accounting, management, trend analysis, prototyping, backend & infrastructure, and a lot more things depending on the project we were working on.
We spent half our time on independant games and the other half on less risky business, working with Ubisoft, pharmaceutical labs, other startups and cultural sites. On the portfolio you will find some of the products we made.
First Years
The company started in 2011 with the release of Startales on iOS, a game made in less than 2 months. It reached more than 500k organic download, a great first step.
It was followed up by a puzzle game that I never finished, even though I made more than 100 levels.
Then in 2012 - 2013 Area Effect worked for Ubisoft as a third party on a serious game for AstraZeneca: Bipolife. A complete new experience for me. This is when I realized that games could be so much more than just pure entertainment.
Scope Issues
Izle started very small, as The Adventure, a multiplayer open world inspired by the old Zeldas. I got to learn a lot from it, from the online aspect to making a huge world, characters and dungeons to then pivoting to a single player game in voxels with a unique art direction and game design. And making a product that stands out. But eventually it got too big for us. The gameplay engine and the universe were really amazing, but the only right thing to do was to stop it, and I’m glad I didn’t drag it too long. It was a very difficult decision.
At this time I was also teaching Unity & C# to game designers at Isart Digital, and getting into design a lot more than before, something that lacked in Izle.
Cultural Entertainment
Then in 2015 - 2017 Area Effect partnered with Histovery on the HistoPad on a product that was a perfect match for me: a mind blowing augmented reality app for medieval castles. Everything that I loved: great design, high accessibility, history, hard tech and amazing art and architecture. We made a lot of Apps for the most prestigious castles in France. I feel like we gave life back to these cultural sites by bringing back the past into the present, something that was desperately needed. It completely changed the experience of tourism and today all major touristic places are looking to create something similar. Very few achieve the level of quality that we set. I’m very proud of these products that can be experienced in the most beautiful places in the world, by millions of users.
While working on the Histopads I also game designed for Sanofi a game called Bact’Attack.
Hyper Game Design
In 2018 I decided to go back to mobile to start making Hyper Casual games. It started with Road Breaker, and then I made many more, around 50 arcade or puzzle prototypes, trying to find the right publishing partner. We worked with Lion Studio, Voodoo and Homa. I fell in love with this kind of games because they were so fresh, and being able to create a prototype in a few days and show it to people instantly felt so satisfying and the best way to learn. I discovered a wild range of game design on mobile, new genres and complete new experiences every 3 months were being created, and I realized that it became the place where new things were done.
Early 2020, days before the covid crisis I met the founder of MWM, a hyperscaling French mobile startup focused on musical apps. They wanted to expand their Apps & Games portfolio and venture beyond music, into a broader market of creativity apps. I joined them to assist in that transition and to build a new game studio for them. Area Effect was sold to MWM in October 2020.