I made a tutorial today. For the first time ever. I’m not a fan of tutorials. I’m an old school graphic designer: if you have to explain it, it’s wrong. Though I do realize that what is good for regular design is often the opposite of what is good for game design. Since the latter usually wants to make things more difficult for you and the former easier.

That being said, I’ve had good experiences with helping people along a little in our games. Apparently our work is weird. And unconventional interfaces are just too freaky to deal with for some. Unless we clearly explain things. Then they’re usually ok.

Not that I’m just including instructions for the stubborn. I think giving hints will help all players. Figuring out the controls really isn’t part of the play experience I designed. So there’s a few hints at the bottom of the screen when the game starts. You can ignore them and even turn them off.

I was surprised by how satisfying it feels to do what the game tells you to do. Especially given that the only “reward” you get for it is the next hint. It’s really simple things too. The game will say something like “Walk forward by pressing UP” and then you press up and, lo and behold, the avatar walks forward, and then the game says “Turn left by pressing LEFT.” Etcetera. It’s completely simplistic like that. But somehow it’s fun.

Apparently humans find it fun to follow orders. That must be part of why games can be so addictive. As collections of rules, games are in fact nothing but orders and commands. Surprisingly, a big reward is not even required for satisfaction. Simply the acknowledgement that you executed the command correctly is sufficient. Must be some leftover from when cavemen lived in herds. We feel happy when we do as we’re told.

After the mini-crunch of preparing a build for IndieCade, I have compacted my to-do list to a little over 80 tasks. I completed 1 of those tasks today. At this rate, I should be working on Bientôt l’été full time for the next 4 months to get it done within the foreseen schedule. That is not going to happen since my kids have holidays in the summer months, and there will be several other interruptions.

So either I work faster or we change the schedule.
I don’t think it’s possible to cut any more.

This is not counting any of the polishing that I want to do without scheduling. I just want to look at the game and tweak what I see. Preferably for a month or more.

Neither included is time for playtesting. Bientôt l’été is not aimed at the masses but I still want to make sure that the most obvious issues are dealt with.

So perhaps we will get an opportunity for the apparently required “hype” before release. If I schedule things well, perhaps I can work on cosmetics first, to a point where the work can be shared. And deal with under-the-hood problems while people -hopefully- get excited about our pretty screenshots and movies.

If we manage to release Bientôt l’été in the fall, it will have been three years since we last published a desktop game. I’m very curious about how it will be received.

A lot of things seem to have changed in videogames since The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path and Fatale. I doubt if the compromises and references we made in the latter two would still make sense today. And that was only three years ago.

The recent success of Journey and Dear Esther shows that pure interactivity is now acceptable in videogames. I realize that both owe some of their success to the way in which they remain loyal to videogames but there is no conventional gameplay to speak of in either. Their form and structure was built to support the content they present. This is good design. This is how to deal with a medium. But three years ago such an approach was considered blasphemous.

Bientôt l’été goes a few steps further again, so I don’t have any illusions about similar mass appeal. But still, it will be interesting to release something in a world that is not aggressively hostile towards the idea of using videogames for artistic expression without relying on the comforting conventions of rules and rewards.

I quite like the idea that very few people read these pages. It feels like we’re a secret society figuring out a lot of stuff before anybody else does.

The great advantage of the internet is also its greatest problem: the fact that everyone can participate in any discussion at any time. While this often provides for interesting new perspectives on a topic, most of the time, interventions “from outside” defuse the focus and derail the reasoning.

When somebody interferes in a trivial discussion with an original remark, it can liven things up. But when a complex train of thought is being developed on the edge of what is currently thinkable, an intrusion can only result in pulling everything back towards the center, towards the well known, the obvious, the banal.

I don’t think I would enjoy this relative obscurity quite as much if nobody would have the opportunity to know. I would probably still do this -I have in the past- but the joy would be less. But quite a number of people are keeping an eye on Tale of Tales these days. So when we do something small and silent, maybe it gets the delicious flavor of elitism, rather than the potentially pitiful taste of obscurity.

I don’t believe in crowds. I know how powerful they can be. But I do not believe that crowds lead to the best possible outcomes. Not even for themselves. I dislike that our contemporary culture values mob rule so highly. I hope the trend changes soon -I fear for mankind if it doesn’t.

In part, this is why I enjoy this relative solitude: it gives me an opportunity to explore and hopefully illustrate the superiority of dedication and focus over diffusion and consensus.

I love stories. But I dislike the way they occur videogames. The only reason why I appreciate cut scenes is because they offer relief from the immense tedium of most gameplay. But I don’t like the holy grail of many an intellectual game lover either: interactive storytelling where the actions of the players change the story.

This rubs me the wrong way on a philosophical level because it puts such great value on cause and effect. And I just don’t believe that reality is so simple that it can be presented as a logical linear sequence, not without losing many aspects that I find important.

We should, on the contrary, use the unique qualities of this non-linear medium to explore the many other relationships between events, between elements, or maybe even learn to enjoy the lack of any such relationship, the lack of understanding, the joy of pure existence, with no story, no explanation, just the heartbreaking beauty of being.

There is something very moving about finding each other in a situation that we both recognize but fail to understand how it happened. Something about touching the timelessness of the cosmos, perhaps. As long as things make sense as strings of cause and effect, we are only dealing with the petty issues that occur on our human time scale. But if we abandon that, maybe we can touch a reality that exists on a much larger scale, so large that time itself becomes but a minor nuisance.

Trying to use games to tell a story is like trying to use Macbeth to tell a story. It’s perfectly fine a long as you’re telling the story of Macbeth. But don’t try to talk about your walk in the park with your dog or the love of Jesus Christ for Maria Magdalena. It’s not going to work. Macbeth does not offer the means to tell those stories. Because it already is a story.

And so is “game”. Game is that story about learning how to do something and then being better at it than others. You can set this story in different contexts -much like it’s plausible to make a Macbeth that takes place during World War 2, or in a hi-tech future. The game story is often told as the victory of an initially weak individual over evil. But it remains the same story -even when it is “subverted” by making you feel bad about killing the enemies. And trying to make all content fit that model is silly.

Bientôt l’été does not offer such a story. That’s one reason why a game format wouldn’t suit it. Maybe there’s no story at all in Bientôt l’été. I certainly didn’t write one. And while the texts come from novels that do contain stories, they have been removed from their context and cannot be put back.

I try to create a certain mood in Bientôt l’été. And there may even be a sort of theme. But as much as there is no game, there is neither a story. Bientôt l’été is just and only what it is. A sort of simulation, a virtual place, something to do, something to play with. It is potentially heavy with meaning, and it is probably capable of bringing tears of joy or sorrow. But it does this, or not, on its own strength, without relying on story or game.

Whether it does this successfully or not, I do believe that this is an important field to explore: the opportunity offered by the videogames medium for creating art that is not narrative, and that introduces a new way of dealing with content, of exploring reality.

Many artists whom I admire are complete jerks in real life. I am so used to this phenomena by now that I have become suspicious of any nice person who tries to be an artist. I don’t have high expectations of the work made by somebody gentle and sympathetic.

I am seldom disappointed in my prejudices. With the caveat that my taste in friends is probably rather odd. I often end up respecting these weirdos far more than people who are probably more deserving.

To me it makes sense. The -let’s call it- “lack of social skills” of many great artists is a logical consequence of my belief that an artist is a mere vessel, a medium that makes a connection between the eternal and the now.

Inside of every artist’s normal human appearance, there is another person: a wiser man, a holy man. This sacred being is by no means the “essence” of the person, or his “true self”, or anything like that. On the contrary: this is a virtually parasitic relationship in which the alien saint inside simply uses the body of the human host to give birth to works of art.

The human vessel often has no better understanding of the work produced by the saint inside than any other member of the audience. But he is aware of this process and he knows that there is a holy being living inside of him. A being that is so gentle and kind and wise and empathic that it surpasses any sentiment and intellect that humans would ever be capable of.

In the face of such absolute superiority, the human incarnation of the artist has no inclination whatsoever to compete with this divinity that he is confronted with every moment of his life. In a way, he doesn’t care about what happens to him, whether people like him or not, whether he offends his fellow earthlings or not. Because inside of him is pure nobility, the Creator of Beauty, the Generator of Meaning, the Giver of Comfort.

The artist knows that his art is his gift to the world. There is nothing his human form can do to surpass this, to bring more joy to people’s lives. So he behaves like an ass. And makes a total spectacle out of himself. And he doesn’t care.

I admire such people. To a fault, probably.

Submitting the work-in-progress build of Bientôt l’été to IndieCade, creating screenshots, video clip and web page for the jury, and asking our collaborators to have a look, gives me that familiar feeling of trying to tell the world about what we made. Twitter! Facebook! Vimeo! Youtube! Even videogame trailer websites! Tell all the world!

But no no. Not yet. Can’t do this yet. It’s not done yet. Hush hush. Don’t tell anyone. And -heaven forbid!- don’t show anyone! Brrr. There’s still a lot of work to do!

I want to get everything just right. All the details should be perfect. More so than in any other game we’ve made. Because this one is so minimal. And it plays with emptiness as part of its content. So I don’t want it to feel unfinished or lack the subtle detail that will serve as reward for the attentive player.

This is why I have reserved almost a third of the development time for polishing. All assets need to be finished by the end of June and then Auriea and I will spend the next three months making everything as pretty as we can manage.

We just submitted a work in progress build of Bientôt l’été to IndieCade. The festival takes place around the release date of the game. So a selection would be nice promotion. Fingers crossed.

But having played some Bientôt l’été yesterday -admittedly only for testing and making screengrabs- my heart is now filled with doubt. Why do I always have to make these weird things? Next time I really should just make something that I know people will just like. Doesn’t have to be candy coated rubbish. Just something that pulls some strings that I know people who play videogames have.

Maybe I’m getting too old to still be amused by the barrage of WTFs every time we release a game. Or, maybe things have really changed in games now! But I have a feeling that instead of enjoying the current goodwill towards non-gamey games, Bientôt l’été takes things yet another few steps further. Into no man’s land.

It’s of course entirely possible that Bientôt l’été is no good. Not just too experimental or too strange, but simply not entertaining, not beautiful, not meaningful. Maybe I suck as an artist. Or I had a bad day when I thought up this game.

Or maybe I haven’t had enough sleep lately and I just need hugs.

Sometimes, in a non-linear environment where multiple systems run alongside each other, things coincide in a way that feels beautiful. When this happens, I immediately feel I should make certain that this event occurs, or at least improve the chances that it might.

But part of the impact of such events is exactly that they are rare, surprising, unforeseen. This gives such an event a certain reality that a more orchestrated, controlled event does not have.

Of course, for a player coming to the game fresh, there is no difference between a chance event and an orchestrated one. Both are new for him. Only after a while may one become aware of the sort of life this system has.