In practical terms this puts the company back to where it started, as an independent studio wholly owned by its directors. As an added wrinkle this time, several employees have had a chance of pitching in and owning a little bit of the company as well.

Beyond “good” or “bad” labels, I think we’ve been extremely lucky to be given this exit, knowing full well that the alternative was either a dramatic shift in development priorities, forced departures or worse… I mean we’re all seeing what is currently happening at Don’t Nod as a reminder of what could have been.

So as of today, I think this is a healthy move, not devoid of risk, but the only one that makes me even more proud of wy workplace than before.

Also, the resolved situation enables us to do smaller scale efforts to maintain our games, and who knows, maybe ship smaller, more experimental games now and then?

As a final thought, I was used to living through concentration processes, but this is the first time that I get to experience the reverse.

I have long been a fan of open source projects, and so I had already joined a Mastodon instance since 2019. It is in my view better than commercial alternatives because it feels like a throwback to a pre web 2.0 internet: people had their kooky little servers chugging along the big corporate ones, and rules where a bit different depending on where you went.

You browsed more as a guest, less as a customer.

It seems that this line of thinking also led me to ditching lazy corporate hosting (github, netlify, whatever) and hosting my (now static) website on my own server. It was pretty fun setting it up, and to think this kind of migration would have been an infinite headache with Wordpress… When did we start thinking that databases were a good idea for personal websites?

Anyways, I guess this rant is a big “the before times were better nyah” but you know what, yeah, fuck the corporatization of websites.

I found that lately, I end up being able to write more by setting up a markdown editor on my phone which syncs to github.

A similar thing happened to me with reading - back when I was commuting to work on public transport, I managed to read entire series of books from a .epub reader app.

It is funny to me how the objectively “best” setup isn’t always the one that ends up being used the most. I could write on my computer and type on a full keyboard, but my kids are using it non-stop, while my phone is private.

I then gladly accept the tradeoff - although a Bluetooth keyboard is a likely upgrade. My thumbs won’t last forever!

When I got home there wasn’t really time or energy to think about that, and buying a computer just to goof around was too prohibitive for our family finances, so I just went by on borrowed machines when I had something to get done at home.

This was before COVID hit. When that started, I took home the PC from work. The invasive security measures and power of those machines made it so it was pretty safe from my kids wanting to use it, and so I kind of recovered the taste for personal computing…

So now for my upcoming birthday I decided to pamper myself in buying a laptop that wouldn’t become obsolete so fast, to recover those precious hours where the kids are asleep.

The hours between 11pm and 1am are my favorite time of day for introspection or experimentation, and I’m glad to have them back.

According to the dates, my last “true” post was three years ago, in 2018. I was happy to reveal that Quantum League, then known as TimeWatch, had been greenlit. That game has been released in Early Access since May 2020, and will hit 1.0 this April. I guess that’ll be a good opportunity for a post-mortem.

In that period, I have been unable to muster the will to write anything public, about game design or anything else. I took it as a failure then, but now I know why: I progressively lost and slowly rebuilt my perception of Game Design.

I look at my words from then and I find it hard not to cringe a little; I managed to repress the need to rewrite myself, except for passages where I sounded downright bitter or even aggressive towards others. If I hurt anyone at that moment, I am sorry now.

Check out www.timewatchgame.com for more, or I guess I’ll keep talking about it more openly now here (nobody reads this blog anyways)

I am back from San Francisco where I attended GDC. I wasn’t planning on going, but then since we submitted the game to the EGW and got accepted, well, I kinda had to.

The entire EGW session has been uploaded publicly to the GDC Vault so if you go to the 42 minute mark you can see me nervously attempt to explain the game to a huge crowd.

This was actually my first time being recorded while speaking in public and BOY DO I MOVE MY HANDS A LOT.

I was pretty nervous but hey, it was fun!

Bonus anecdote: sharing a session with Petri Purho, 10 years after sharing the IGF expo floor with him. I had even made a post about it at the time and everything… So this is what being old as fuck feels like…

I am super pleased (and freaked out) to announce that Secret Project’s first public appearance will be at the 2018 Experimental Gameplay Workshop, held on the last day of GDC.

I’ve made a point of attending that session in the years I’ve been to GDC, and seeing the selected games and prototypes has been an inspiration and a breath of fresh air every single time. Now I’m panicking a little bit at the prospect of having to demo the game to a packed room of game developers, and finding a way to communicate what the game is about in only 10 minutes or so.

Speaking of the game, the pace is slowly picking up. There are now 3 developers assigned full-time to the project. The current main focus of work is refactoring the underlying network code (so now you know it’s an online game then!) to make it more robust, we’re also making a proper research for the art style, and narrowing down the minimum product we need to launch on early access or closed alpha.

Stuff like the game’s final name, or levels, or details of some core mechanics are still being defined, even at this advanced stage of development.

Au travail!

It’s happening!

We’ve resumed the original plan, frozen back in September. I may even be able to finally talk openly about it very soon.

I REALLY need to tell everyone about it.

We decided to freeze development right after coming back from Gamescom, because a big contract got signed and we needed everyone on that job to get the ball rolling. Additionally, since the signed project is in the roughly same genre as Secret Project, it would look bad releasing it while initial development was going on on the other one.

And yet, this may turn out to be for the best after all. I am able to take a few steps back on the design and look at it with fresh eyes (the time before Gamescom was pretty crazy in that regard, we completely overhauled the look of the game in 4 weeks!), and we’re also getting to develop some finer technical infrastructure that I hope will carry over to Secret Project once development resumes.

Meanwhile, we’re also getting good vibes from the few people we showed the alpha to in GC, and I still get to go ahead and fill the backlog while no one’s looking to sneak in more important features.

I hope to report back soon with part 4: the Thawing!

In time for Halloween, we’ve put together a compilation of elusive “sounds” of howling planets and whistling helium that is sure to make your skin crawl.

Source: Spooky Space ‘Sounds’

Source: Philosophie des jeux vidéo – France Culture

We had two weeks to make it work. I’m kind of freaking out thinking on how to actually get the mechanic implemented in networked multiplayer under such a short deadline. The project would have most certainly failed its first milestone if it weren’t for the heroic arrival of… El CTO! *cue Mariachi fanfare*

Proof of Concept

The pitch had piqued the CTO’s curiosity, and since he didn’t have much to do after the client project had died, he had decided to participate in the prototyping phase. Bonus points: he even had recently released a single-player mobile game with germane mechanics.

We quickly set to work. After a short meeting we defined our objectives for the milestone and hashed out how the mechanic would work out. The only design documentation I had at that point were the pitch slides and some old notes I had taken months before, when I had written down the first iteration of the idea.

We found a Unity multiplayer boilerplate project and used it as base. While the CTO set to work on the basic tech needed for the mechanic, I attempted to find what would the minimal level design requirements be for it to be properly shown.

It’s interesting to me that during our first tests of the mechanic, we managed to temper our enthusiasm for the mechanic enough as to remain skeptics. I believe, in hindsight, that this attitude helped us refine the mechanic to what it needed to be.

A week in, we had a quick informal review with the C-level execs to check how the project was going. Being a 1-week prototype, we still managed to prove that the mechanic was possible, albeit poorly explained at that point.

During the following week we concentrated on stabilizing the tech and adding feedback to the core shooting to make it feel better. We were playing it daily between us and now little by little our skepticism lifted.

At the end of the two weeks, all projects were expected to present to the entire company what had been achieved since. When it was our turn, something magical happened. While we were playing, the entire audience started cheering, booing or otherwise reacting to what was happening on-screen.

That crowd reaction sealed the deal for our CEO, who, even if he still didn’t properly understood the game per se, recognized that there was something exciting in there somewhere. We had just passed our very first milestone.

Pre-prod Prototype

After that stage was cleared, the bosses met and we got our second mandate: make a stabler version of the game, but in another engine. For that task we got assigned a second programmer, so the team was now a whopping 3 people including me.

Since we were after all low-resource, we didn’t receive a deadline like other, more staffed projects. For the first 3 weeks we even worked with no deadline at all, just porting the game and improving it over the initial prototype.

So with a rather free outlook but low resources, I was half-forced to focus on high-value, low-cost features and tasks. We chose to keep stabilizing the core of the game, adding very few map features. One thing the game did require due to its core mechanic was good HUD info to help the player make sense of what is happening, so we iterated that.

Slowly, as I tested the game, it made its way onto the computers of some co-workers. We are using Steam to distribute internal builds, and a side-effect of that is that old testers were alerted of when we had pushed a new build, and very soon started playing between themselves, without having been prompted by me to test. This was actually mind-blowing to me, never in my career as designer had people outside of the project been eager to play an in-progress prototype!

Even more, for some matches other co-workers even stopped what they were doing and instead spectated the matches, cheering the players on.

Around 3 weeks after we had started the port, my boss lets me know that they want to set a greenlight date for the project. He assured me that it wasn’t a kill-gate, rather a test to see whether the game was ready to go into regular production or not, and that if it failed it would get a further greenlight. A rather sweet deal. I was secretly hoping to not pass the greenlight so that I could keep refining the project’s core at my own pace.

With the deadline set, this helped us give a narrower focus on stability and readability features. Every test we made drew larger internal crowds.

A day before the greenlight, a high-profile local game designer friends with my boss came to test the game, and he seemed to really dig it. His feedback went in the direction I was already thinking of, so that assured me that I wasn’t doing everything wrong or that the game’s appeal so far also existed beyond the microcosm of our company, which was one of my main concerns.

The greenlight meeting came, and obviously everyone agreed that the game was more than ready to enter production and target a limited closed alpha release ASAP. No extended refinement period for me…

I decided to take a week’s vacation to prep for what seems to be a more hectic time. In the following days, I attempted to generate a backlog of stories as complete as possible for what would be a closed alpha. As a last fun activity before vacations I organised an internal tournament of the game.

That tournament’s reaction took over the company by storm, and rather shocked me. It was more than I could have dreamed a game I worked on could generate. Maybe people will really like this!

Now I rest, and we’ll see what the following months bring.

Play more games! No money required! Just add friends.

Source: How to build an amazing board game collection for $10! | Shut Up & Sit Down

One of the selected projects is an idea I pitched, and I now find myself at the lead of that project, one with a very nerdy mechanic.

I kind of need to tell someone of how that goes, even though if I cannot yet share what the project is.

So, here is what has been happening so far…

Selection process

The project we were on employed nearly 90% of the company’s resources when the client pulled the plug, and so we found ourselves suddenly with nothing to do. The bosses, having been through the situation a certain number of times, were quick to react and announced a company-wide brainstorm process to start at once.

We were to form brainstorm teams around the company’s pillars and proficient genres, each moderated by a member of the game design team.

I got to lead a team centered around “Multiplayer action” games, a kind of catch-all category as opposed to the other which were much more specific (survival, co-op, battleground, arpg, management…). Designers were free to organize the brainstorm process as they saw fit.

I don’t know if it’s because of our theme being broader than the rest, but when other teams were still establishing common boundaries to work within, ours had already compiled a large list of pitches. We did our best to keep the pitch authors anonymous as to prevent influencing the selection process with our personal affinities.

Within those pitches, this particular idea I had thought of some time before and set aside because at that time it wasn’t practical.

We organized several rounds of voting to whittle down a list of around 20 ideas to just 4. My idea had made it into the final 4, along with another interesting one. The other two were cringe-worthy at best.

Once our 4 ideas were selected, we put together a small slide stack to present them to the company, as did every other brainstorm team. I think that the fun and creative atmosphere this event generated helped dispel some of the uncertainty and gloom which had set over us after the project’s cancellation.

Then, after presentations, the studio’s executives reviewed all pitches and selected one per brainstorm team. In our case, then, mine.

Selected pitches would see some kind of further development, depending on what they though was needed to sell the idea.

Which led me to me being assigned a single developer with the mandate of producing a workable prototype of the idea within two weeks.

To be continued…

The reason why I needed to write this down is simple: it is the first time in my 10 years of working as a designer in the industry that I have the opportunity to develop an idea I have pitched from a Creative Lead role.

I am both confident and scared shitless of what lies ahead, and writing helps me make sense of it all in a very selfish way. Just old-school blogging.

Simple and Complex

One of the deepest impressions on someone who happens to wander into a film mixing studio is that there is no necessary connection between ends and means. Sometimes, to create the natural simplicity of an ordinary scene between two people, dozens and dozens of soundtracks have to be created and seamlessly blended into one. At other times an apparently complex ‘action’ soundtrack can be conveyed with just a few carefully selected elements. In other words, it is not always obvious what it took to get the final result: it can be simple to be complex, and complicated to be simple.

The general level of complexity, though, has been steadily increasing over the eight decades since film sound was invented. And starting with Dolby Stereo in the 1970’s, continuing with computerized mixing in the 1980’s and various digital formats in the 1990’s, that increase has accelerated even further. Seventy years ago, for instance, it would not be unusual for an entire film to need only fifteen to twenty sound effects. Today that number could be hundreds to thousands of times greater.

Well, the film business is not unique: compare the single-take, single-track 78rpm discs of the 1930’s to the multiple-take, multi-track surround-sound CDs of today. Or look at what has happened with visual effects: compare King Kong of the 1930’s to the Jurassic dinosaurs of the 1990’s. The general level of detail, fidelity, and what might be called the “hormonal level” of sound and image has been vastly increased, but at the price of much greater complexity in preparation.

The consequence of this, for sound, is that during the final recording of almost every film there are moments when the balance of dialogue, music, and sound effects will suddenly (and sometimes unpredictably) turn into a logjam so extreme that even the most experienced of directors, editors, and mixers can be overwhelmed by the choices they have to make.

So what I’d like to focus on are these ‘logjam’ moments: how they come about, and how to deal with them when they do. How to choose which sounds should predominate when they can’t all be included? Which sounds should play second fiddle? And which sounds – if any – should be eliminated? As difficult as these questions are, and as vulnerable as such choices are to the politics of the filmmaking process, I’d like to suggest some conceptual and practical guidelines for threading your way through, and perhaps even disentangling these logjams.

Or– better yet — not permitting them to occur in the first place.

Source: Walter Murch

C’est pourquoi j’ai décidé de braver l’interdit et de le sauvegarder ici, si jamais quelqu’un tombe dessus au hasard d’une recherche: Bonne écoute!

L’Enfer de Dante, Création musicale composée et interprétée par Syd matters• Crédits : Pierre Ropert – Radio France

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Source: Les Sept boules de cristal: feuilleton radiophonique de 1959

L’usage veut qu’on ne donne jamais la solution d’une contrepèterie, chacun devant la trouver lui-même. On dit qu’il faut être trois pour apprécier une contrepèterie : celui qui l’énonce, celui qui la comprend, et celui qui ne la comprend pas.

Source: Contrepèterie — Wikipédia