The Portrait series shines a spotlight on staff from different departments to learn more about how they contribute to Lü’s success.
Lü has a team dedicated to educational application development and a team dedicated to platform development. For this first portrait, we met with Isabelle, Olivier, and Omar, educational game developers, and Marie-Pier, a game designer, to find out about what they do.
What does a game developer do at Lü?
Basically, our role is to collaborate with artists, game designers, and UX designers to make educational games. Applications are made up of different components. There’s scripting, computer graphics, music, and game design, and the application as a whole has to be user-friendly. Once the design document is ready, we analyze the needs to ensure that the application is programmable and as efficient as possible. Any necessary improvements are suggested to the team. That’s the approach we take to collaboratively improve the game design.
What tech stack do you use?
We use Unity as a video game engine and C#, which is complementary to Unity. We also use Visual Studio as an IDE, GitHub as a provider, and Git as version control. Each developer can use the interface of their choice as a source tree. Depending on the developer’s comfort level, they can also use GIMP for image manipulation and Audacity for sound editing. That means we can make minor adjustments ourselves. For game design, we use Unity, Git, and Adobe XD for wireframing and Confluence for documentation. Finally, the team works with Jira to manage our projects.
What’s the biggest technical challenge you face at Lü?
Because our platform is unique (motion detection camera, lighting system, etc.), we have to constantly ensure that our code and our solution work well and are optimized. Since our games are aimed at children, the design obviously needs to be adapted to their needs. Our system also has various constraints (physical location of the system in gyms, size of the projection surface, interaction with balls, etc.) that we have to juggle on a daily basis.
However, using multiple technologies means we’re able to be multidisciplinary. Some projects may involve working with AI or object recognition, or collaborating with research centers. These are valuable opportunities to acquire new knowledge.
What are some of the reasons that made you want to join the Lü team?
The positive impact that the product has on children is really motivating and makes our work meaningful. That’s the main thing that inspired all of us to apply. Lü also destigmatizes video games, since the industry often has a bad image. That’s another thing we really liked about the company. “As a junior developer, I felt that I was hired more for my soft skills than my hard skills, and I never had the feeling that I wasn’t being taken seriously,” says Olivier.
Lü is a truly transparent company. As soon as you’re hired, they take the time to explain the salary structure and to talk about the importance of pay equity. That helps us to understand our salary (which is very competitive) and how we can develop within the company.
What do you enjoy most about your role at Lü?
