Bosquet is the result of a collaboration between Bellecour Ecole and ESPPERA, a French association of doctors, nurses, therapists and other medical professionals whose goal is to help the development of pediatric palliative nursing (more information here). The game primarily targets children with terminal illnesses, but its message is directed at their parents and the nursing staff: to accept what is a dire situation and make sure these children can live their life to the fullest.

As for my contribution to this project, I was in charge of the character's conceptualization, implementation and writing. This entailed two major challenges: the first, due to the sensitive nature of the themes, I had to be careful with the mechanics and words I chose, and the second, due to the multicursal gameplay loop, it was hard to predict which characters would interact with one another.

When creating the characters, I had three objectives in mind:

• To make a compelling character arc based on a relationship with sickness.
• To make sure their ability is a reflection of their personality.
• To link what makes them happy with their character arc.

As such, I created an easy to read template and filled one for each character, so that the other designers as well as concept artists could use them as a reference. Here's an example with Otto, one of the main characters:

Once that task was over, I helped implement them in the Unity Engine by creating custom scripts that would raise or lower a character's happiness depending on the player's actions, which was mostly done through action listeners.

During the final week, my focus was mostly directed towards writing dialogs for the characters. This proved to be a bit difficult, since I had to hint at what made them happy or sad all the while making sure it fit with their personality. For each dialog, I also had to think of multiple responses from different characters, since there was no guarantee that they'd still be part of the player's team when the dialog prerequisites are met.