Axel Venet

Kalaxia is an open-source project for a browser-based multiplayer strategy game. Players play by faction in a futuristic universe to ensure their faction's hegemony. This project brings together the community of Asylamba, another game of the same genre, on which I was a volunteer developer before the project was shut down by its owners. The community has therefore rallied around this new collaborative project.

As the lead developer, I assembled a team of varying size over time that worked on the game. We chose a Go API to leverage the parallelization capabilities of this language, which is essential for a real-time game, as well as its performance and ease of use. On the front end, we initially started with a native JS app before migrating to VueJS to improve our productivity. We initially chose MongoDB before returning to a more relational model with PostgreSQL, whose JSON field management offered an ideal compromise between these two worlds. The portal for managing the different game servers is in Symfony.

This project is technically enriching because, being free from time or budget constraints, we can afford to choose bold gameplay that technically forces us to push certain limits. It also takes me out of the usual project context with new challenges (regular calculation of productions, NPC AI, universe reactivity, etc.). Developed in my free time, it takes a while to see the light of day, but thanks to contributions and numerous feedbacks from its patient community, it is progressing steadily and brings its share of novelties with each new release!

Médiévistes is my personal project aimed at contributing to the development of the medieval reenactment world in France (and perhaps beyond tomorrow!). My ultimate goal is to create a fortified village where people can come for one or more days to discover daily life in the Middle Ages firsthand: crafts, combat... All in an evocative setting with banquets and period music.

Until then, I am working on creating an online platform to promote the actors in the field: associations, events, merchants-artisans. The idea is to open the doors of this still little-known community to the general public to promote our heritage and our History. This platform works on several axes and has several major projects, including the creation of a marketplace where artisans can sell their creations online and a documentary base to centralize historical knowledge and make it known in a fun way, particularly through a webzine. Lots of work, therefore, but I haven't given up on achieving it, and every small step is a victory!

For this platform, I chose a Symfony API to leverage my expertise and gain productivity. It was also an opportunity to explore VueJS further, which proved to be a valuable tool for keeping the front end well-organized and performant. For SEO, I use Nuxt to maintain control over the numerous META tags needed for good referencing. The infrastructure runs entirely on Docker, which allows for easy use of various tools including Elasticsearch and Redis.

Freshly arrived at Benext, I joined a mission at France Télévisions within the teams responsible for the france.tv platform. I worked on the Back-Office API, allowing editors from different channels to manage the platform's various content. As the sole backend developer, I worked very closely with the PO and the front-end teams to best meet their needs. To do this, we brought several evolutions to the existing web services while creating new ones.

Secondly, I was assigned to the project of redesigning the website itself. In one month, we reworked the front-end of the main screens of the platform in a major relaunch operation. Working closely with the UI/UX teams, we integrated the mockups as quickly as possible, while refactoring the legacy code of this product whenever possible.