Jérémie Tessier spends most of his time playing, making or thinking about video games.
Game Designer
Creating games in various forms since 2007, I've started making games with Unity in 2013 and I keep getting better at it.
Progress-Ions is one of my answers to the “idle/incremental” genre, inspired by a lot of other games I’ve played of that genre. It’s also a very timid push into having actually people try my game and give their opinion, but I think there’s something fun here and I love the ideas that I try to explore. My initial plan was to sell this, but I’m not 100% convinced yet.
Food Truck Country is my entry for this year’s “A Game By Its Cover” jam where you take a fake cart from an exposition called Famicase and make a game with it. I immediately had an idea to make a game about running a food truck, driving around and cooking without any stress or lose condition, so this cart really grabbed me immediately.
Sweet Home On The Hill had two goals in my mind. First, I wanted to create a turn-based role playing game that could be akin to Etrian Odyssey or Shin Megami Tensei: Strange journey. Second, I wanted to make a game with atmosphere, where every battle is a bit stressful and you needed to figure out the nature of your enemies before being able to defeat them.
Crablocks is my entry for this year ‘A Game By its Cover’ jam where you take a cart from the Famicase 2020 exposition and make a game with it. I went with this cart because of the cute design and the gameplay ideas it gave me. I was going to make a multiplayer puzzle game (that can also be played alone) where you control a girl and her crab pal, both with different mechanics.
ParaIdle is my attempt at working with ECS, Unity’s new game development paradigm (?) and also the occasion for me to make a small idle game as well. You build a small city by creating houses that get filled with people and you try to buy furniture that matches their tastes in order to make more money to buy upgrades and eventually more houses and furniture. The whole thing went okay, but I spent so little time on this project everyday that things took way too long.
Casle Of Illvision is in parts my attempt at a text-parser adventure game, but again, with a twist. While you will be spending a fair time in text-parser mode, the game has actually four different gameplays and they all intertwine in the same maps and the same puzzles. Indeed, you will need to go through a roguelike, platformer and first person mode of the map as well in order to finish the game.
3011: An Office Space Odyssey is my sixth GameJam project where I programmed, did voice acting, level design and visual effects for a puzzle game about the Global Game Jam 2020’s theme: Repair.
Enemy Database is a GameJam game that I made for the ‘A Game By It’s Cover 2019’ jam where you had to use a cart from Famicase 2019 as your inspiration. I decided quickly on Enemy Database, a cart that gave me plenty of ideas to make a sci-fi themed first person shooter where you would recover enemies to a big database while taking part in a small story of sorts.
Hammed Robbery is my fifth team GameJam project where I slept about 9 hours in 2 days in order to program and design levels for a stealth game centered around Ludum Dare’s 44th theme: Your Life Is Currency.
Amateur Game Reviewer
I used to review iOS and PC games on a semi-regular basis since 2012, now only looking at PC titles.
Zexion is a metroidvania but it is much more “Metroid” than “Vania”. It often times feels like Metroid 1 for the NES, but the possibilities to power up, find new upgrades and backtrack around the map to progressively plink away at the huge world and challenge is also quite modern. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it even if the uneven difficulty and the painful traversal almost turned me off from completing the game.
I’m not the hugest Borderlands fan in the world; I’ve played 2 for about 200 hours and then gave the Pre-Sequel about another hundred. Borderlands 3 wasn’t that engaging, but I gotta say that 4 was pretty good! I’m still always asking the same question when I play this franchise (why is it that the only company that makes a game that feels and plays like this also writes it like this), but ultimately I had a great time with Borderlands 4 and I probably would’ve played it fair bit more if the endgame / New Game+ situation had been less weird.
Cycle Idle RPG is the “ideal” idle game in my book; the progression isn’t too fast, there are a lot of side systems to work on in order to improve your main system and while everything is fairly linear, you have the impression that you can make some decisions here and there that will make you progress faster, or unlock something sooner. It’s a neat little game that I enjoyed for many days before hitting a wall that I couldn’t manage to go over - and I certainly tried!
Q-Up is a delightful incremental game about a fake eSport of the same name which basically consists of flipping a coin, with one team winning and the other team losing. While the core part of the gameplay is about the coin flips, everything you build around that - customizing your character’s skills, gear and upgrades - is the meat and potatoes of this fun title. I had a blast with it even if it got frustrating at times, and I went through most of the characters you could unlock while really looking forward to see what the next one did. If you enjoy cheeky incremental games I wholeheartedly recommend this one!
Gloomhaven is a massive “legacy” board game where you and your friends go through a campaign of defeating monsters, finding treasures, unlocking new characters and improving them as you make decisions, try to complete long term and short term quests and strategize around resource management, incomplete information and progressively mounting odds. I had a great time playing through the physical version of the board game with my friends when it came out, but I was kinda apprehensive of the solo video game version; It is absolutely a “me” problem, but I do not have it in me to go through this whole game again.
Monster Train is the platonic ideal of the deck building roguelike. Everything is in here; you have a starting deck of creature and spell cards that you use to fight as you make choices in the various branching paths of the map until you reach the boss at the end, all the while adding, removing and improving your cards with a wide array of modifiers and effects. Then, no matter if you won or lost, you gain some progression to unlock different factions, more cards, and more challenges for your next run. I had a good time with Monster Train, but much like my experiences with most roguelikes, once I had a run that went really well and got to the end, I was satisfied, but that’s entirely a “me” thing!
Splintered is a really neat game in the style of Dragon Quest 1 where you play a single hero trying to save the world from an upcoming threat by exploring the world, fighting bosses, becoming stronger and using items and spells to vanquish your foes. Once that is done, the ‘real’ game opens up, with a built-in randomizer, different kind of challenges, and more! I’ve went through the game one time and that was quite enough for me, but I can see how it would appeal to people who really enjoy randomizers.
Doors Paradox is a pretty neat puzzle game where you solve various self-contained “door” puzzles with the ultimate goal of unlocking them and moving on to the next one, while trying to find some collectibles along the way. The puzzles themselves are bite-sized and usually do not require an incredible amount of thought, so it was a nice game to go through. I had a fun time with it!
Idle Wizards, in one simple sentence, is overwhelming with 9 years of content, mechanics and features tacked on top of one another, culminating in a game that has a lot to offer, but also that goes a bit too fast. The kind of game where you unlock three new mechanics at once, where the numbers seem to get a mind of their own and just start spiraling out of control, and before you know it, you’re level 100e39. Needless to say, I had a short time with this game before getting overwhelmed. It doesn’t mean that the game is bad per se, but maybe the pacing is pretty difficult for a new player.
A Short Hike is a delightful little game about a bird climbing a mountain; In order to do so, you’ll explore a large environment and interact with various NPCs, most of which will have small quests for you to do or challenges to complete, I went through the game in a single session and really enjoyed it! Some parts were a bit frustrating and others were overwhelming, but ultimately it was a fun time with a lot of heart.
Professional in many things.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Video Game Design from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi and a college degree in Computer Science from the CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal.
I'm currently working as a game programmer and designer on Paralives, a life simulation game!
Before that I did about four years as a technical lead in another mobile-focused studio and a year as a live-ops programmer in a similar company.
I've also worked for five years now as a web programmer but did my share of work in C, C++, Java, Objective-C and many more languages
Elfie’s Day Off is my entry for this year’s “A Game By Its Cover” jam where you take a fake cart from an exposition called Famicase and make a game with it. I really wanted to make a very small game that I could do alongside my day job with a small scope and not a lot of technical hurdles, but I also wanted to try to make a wario-ware like microgame collection, and I think it works! Here’s the cart that inspired me the game;