This is a web resume that especially details my professional works at F4 and my personal works.

A classic one-page resume is also downloadable (pdf).

Name: Olivier CHATEAU

Home address: 1 Rue des clochettes 60200 Compiègne (FRANCE)

Phone number: +33 (0) 683 665 986

e-mail: olivier.chateau@gmail.com

Date of birth: 5 June 1982

Nationality: French

Marital status: Single

Driving license: yes (French, B vehicule)

University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC)

2003 - 2006

Master’s degree in computer science with emphasis on Engineering, "Project and Innovation Management" and "Intensive Entrepreneur Training".

Lycée St Joseph, La Roche Sur Yon

2000 - 2003

Mathematics and Physics preparatory classes for entering School of Engineering.

Lycée St Maire du Port, Les Sables d'Olonne

1997 - 2000

French Baccalauréat (Scientific, option Mathematics) with Second Class Honors.

F4 is a European and Asian video game development company, coming from the engineering and the video game worlds. The company is owned by a group whose activities range from software engineering to scientific research and development.

F4 has conceived two online worlds: Exalight and Empire of Sports.

Exalight - Since December 2006

Exalight is a MMO Racing games, developped in association with Neuf Cegetel (a French Internet Provider) released on April 2008.

Project manager

Duration: October 2007 - Today

Mission 1: Plan the monthly releases and their contents (features, items, track)

Mission 2: Anticipate problems and alert the production director if deliveries, goals and quality can't be reached

Mission 3: Start and follow the development and graphic productions (new features, tracks...)

Mission 4: Lead weekly meetings and write down their report

Mission 5: Dispatch bugs to appropriate recipients

Game designer

Duration: November 2006 - Today

Mission 1: Design the race game mechanics (piloting, weapons, arena mode, team mode)

Mission 2: Design the avatar system (avatar and car caracteristics, item use, talent trees, special attacks, XP gain system, reward system and so on)

Mission 3: Design the game services (ingame mails, friends list, player-to-player item exchange, shops, player rankings, avatar creation, players "yellow pages", temporary group, guild...)

Mission 4: Design every interfaces and their gameflows with Microsoft Office Visio

Mission 5: Create items in databases

Mission 6: Help designing the notification system (client-server communications)

Results: Most of my game services design, interfaces and gameflows have been re-used or adapted by game designers for Empire of Sports. The race and RPG game mechanics fulfill customer's wishes : casual gameplay oriented.

Level designer

Duration: March 2006 - Today

Mission 1: Help designing tracks and decors with 3D artists

Mission 2: Place, dress and move NPCs in cities with Maya 7.0 and internal scripts.

Storyliner

Duration: June 2007

Mission: Writing the main plot of the story, why the races are different, why they are racing, what their own goals are, what the Exalight is and so on.

Results: Because of the pressure of the customer Neuf, the delays were very short (too short to take the time to find and develop other leads), but the main pitch and race histories were accepted.

Quest scripter

Duration: June 2007 - September 2007

Mission: Write and script dialogs and quests in HTML and LUA.

Results: The first quests and dialogs have been scripted, the method and technology have been improved according to my remarks.

Empire of Sports

Empire of Sports is a sport-oriented MMORPG, developped in association with Infront, the world-wide second sports rights managing compagny.

Duration: February 2006 - November 2006

Mission 1: Design the main concept of the avatar RPG and metabolic engines

Mission 2: Design the main concept of bodybuilding game mechanics (mini-games : bashing, word typing, reflex...) then script and tune them (LUA code)

Mission 3: Help designing the main concept of the tennis sport game mechanics (click & shoot solution)

Mission 4: Design interfaces and their gameflows with Microsoft Office Visio

Results: As I got involved at the very beginning of Empire of Sports then moved on Exalight, my works can only be considered as a first draw or a base since they have been affected by other game designers.

Adventure point & click with mini-games prototype

Duration: February 2006 - June 2006

Mission 1: Design mini-games (like sokoban, card game, drawing game) that help the adventure to progress.

Mission 2: Place dynamic cameras in 3D levels with Maya and Lua.

Mission 3: Plot the main story, dialogs and item interactions.

Results: The prototype with 6 levels, 5 mini-games and 8 NPCs has been released to the customer (a French Museum) who didn't follow up.

Internship

Duration: September 2004 - February 2005

Mission: Long term industrial Trainee at Cybernétix - Offshore. Development of a real time interface for piloting underwater observation robots.

IT Context: C++, QT, DirectX, low-level development, HMI

Results: The graphical interface I created is now used on the underwater observation mini-robot JUNIOR and taken as a reference for the development of Human-Machine Interfaces on any new Cybernétix observation robots.

Writing

Novel

I am currently writing a novel called "Wakenings", a planet-opera sci-fi thriller.

"Hagen Vane is a hard-boiled cop living in Mascareigne. One day, he wakes up with no memory of the past few days in Babylone, an old and forgotten city that lies under Mascareigne. In the same time, Calico Jack a Babylonian goes up to Mascareigne in the pursuit of a brand new life. They don't know each other but their destinies will become estrangled..."

It will be a 40 chapters novel. For now, 24 chapters are finished (nearly 160 Microsoft Office Word pages).

Short stories

From time to time, I write short stories (5000 to 30000 characters). Mainly Sci-Fi oriented, with a hint of humor, I send them to writing contests if they happen to fit the requirements.

One of these - "My life with Atomic Girl" - has been selected among a hundred to be one of the twenty that will be published in an anthology about super-heroes, in December 2008.

"In a world where a super-hero can be found at every corner fighting any super-villain, me, an average-joe, I fell in love with Atomic Girl. This is our story." could be the one-line pitch.

The English version of "My life with Atomic Girl" can be found here.

Game concepts

W.Y.R.D

Once upon a time, my current compagny asked its employees to come up with new game concepts, mainly Nintendo DS oriented. W.Y.R.D is the formalisation of a game concept and aspiration I have been thinking for a long time.

Unfortunately, no proposition have been kept : F4 is currently developping two online worlds, more are to come in 2008 and 2009; there is no time nor resource to make our own original Nintendo DS game. And because of my novel, I don't have time to develop it for now.

Here is the W.Y.R.D game concept (pdf, English)

Synesthesia

Synesthesia was a school game project, a musical shoot 'em up coded in C++ with the SDL library. The project wasn't the game itself (which was never finished) but a level editor tool.

There is quite nothing left from those projects, only a couple of images. On this one, you can see the UI with the scrollable board for the timeline/level, items and level properties above and the monsters and bonus library on the right part (each can be dropped on the time line). Levels were saved as XML files then played by the game engine.

Synesthesia main plot is also downloadable (pdf, English).

Mapeul v1.0

Mapeul is my first and only attempt to make a video game nearly on my own (with a couple friends for the art). I'm quite ashamed to say that I didn't manage to do anything more than a moving animated square. The point is, from September 2005 to February 2006, I spent more time writing the story, characters, dialogs and game mechanics than launching DevC++.

Mapeul v1.0 is telling the story of a student in Mathematics and Physics Preparatory Classes, Badger Dabger, that happened to be the Chosen One (only because they had nothing better when needed) to deliver the Godesses Math & Matics captured by the Evil Rabbit Pan-Pan. A five acts epic adventure point & click game with many round-trips between our world and the magical world of Mapeul (where everyone is an animal), hot girls, a Teddy Bear, joke contests, Mathematics, Evil Rabbits and quite a lot of humor (or at least, I tried).

The website is quite magicly still opened (French).

Associations

BD humanum est

"BD humanum est" was a student association in charge of the organisation of a comic-book festival in Compiègne. I was the president for two years, managing a six members team, plannings, budgets and relations with comic writers and drawers (invitation, travel, accomodation...).

The festival I was organizing took place on the 9th and 10th April 2005, 15 French and Belgian artists were invited and 500 to 1000 people came to see them. Unfortunately, there is no more dedicated website but this one (French) reviews the event.

The association and the festival no longer exist, no student having shown any interest to continue the comic adventure in Compiègne...

Graf'Hit (radio)

From February 2005 to September 2006 I have been running a one-hour-and-a-half cultural radio show called "Culture en placard" on Monday evenings.

The program was broadcasted on internet and the city of Compiègne, each chronicler talked about his or her main interest (music, comic book, video and so on). As the "boss", I was in charge of the timing, my fellow partners' behavior, technical matters, receiving and interviewing guests (from a comic drawer to a Town Hall representative).

Every recorded radio sessions can be found on this page (French).

Software

Excellent knowledge (daily use) of Microsoft Office (Visio, Word, Excel, Access), OpenOffice

Good knowledge of Photoshop CS2, text editor (PSPad), XML editor (Altova)

Basic knowledge of Maya 7.0, Visual C++, NSIS, QT

Coding skills

Excellent knowledge of XML, HTML & CSS

Knowledge of C/C++, Java, LUA, UML and networks

OS

Excellent knowledge (daily use) of Windows XP

Knowledge of Linux and Unix

French: native speaker

English: fluent

Spanish: school level

Japanese: school level

Video games

Regular video game player on PC (RPG, FPS, action, click & point) and consoles (RPG and oldies)

Litterature

Mainly Sci-Fi (Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick...), Fantasy (Neil Gaiman, Andrzej Sapkowski...) and humorous litterature (P.J. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, Terry Prachett)

Cinema

Mainly action movies (Fight Club, Die Hard saga, The killer, Hardboiled...)

Series addicted (Battlestar Galactica, X-files, How I met your mother...)

Sci-Fi anime lover (Macross, Harlock, Cowboy-bebop...)

Role Playing Games

Game Master for “Dungeons & Dragons”, “Brain Soda” and “Legend of the 5 Rings”

Magic: The Gathering player (card game)

AT-43 player (miniature game)

Sports

Playing golf since 1994

Trying to jog every week...