One of the nice things about making art is that size doesn’t matter. You can make a tiny work of art for just a few people and it’s perfectly satisfying.

But is this still true when working in a popular medium and embracing it as such? I imagine it would be utterly unsatisfying to make easily accessible work and then have only a small number of people play it. When creating work with the potential of appealing to many people, you sort of have the obligation to try and reach all those people too.

That can be an expensive project. A small art project can be a bit broken. But when working in a less elitist sphere, the piece just has to function properly, technically and artistically. It just has to work. So people are not confused. So they get the work, on a first try, without effort or preparation.

This is entirely possible but it takes considerable effort and the accompanying cost. I’m attracted to the challenge. But I’m also still drawn to small projects that you make one day and publish the next. My love of early websites may never go away.

That I don’t want to make art anymore should not be construed as a recommendation for others. Even if I want to do something else, my admiration for those who do make art knows no bounds. It’s bigger than it ever was.

One of the less glorious reasons why I don’t want to make art any more, is that I don’t think I’m very good at it. And, for a change, I would like to try something that perhaps I can be good at, or of which it doesn’t matter so much whether one is good at it.

Contrary to my younger self, I do not wish the extinction of contemporary art. I wish for artists to keep trying, to keep pushing. I’ll just be one of those people who stands on the sidelines now, cheering them on, expressing my admiration without really being involved.

One of the reasons why my work of the past years has leaned towards art, is an implicit fear of corniness. There’s a lot of things that humans find beautiful or pleasant that have been featured and exploited in popular entertainment. This omni-presence has rendered such depictions or topics virtually taboo for art.

Even today, and even far outside the art world, creative people often find it difficult to include pictures of rainbows in their work, or sunsets, or kittens, or unicorns or mermaids, without a sense of irony. I personally dislike irony because it’s cheap. But I behaved in a no less cowardly fashion by simply avoiding such features altogether.

I think the inclusion of the science fiction elements in Bientôt l’été has helped me get over my fear. Even though Bientôt l’été itself is beyond a doubt intended to be a Work of Art, it contains this virtually kitschy element that may be the key to freeing myself from the timidity that has been my artistic practice.

I am no longer afraid to make videogames about things that are simply pleasant to observe. I still want to avoid the exploitation that often goes along with the use of such elements in mass media. But I think I can do this by being utterly sincere. Mass media are embarrassing because the images they produce are not good enough, not sincere enough. Because their only goal is money. But I have far more important goals.

In the first years that I created in the interactive medium (web sites from 1995 to 2002), I did so with the explicit notion that what I was making was not art. I was already very arrogant though. In the utopian spirit of early cyberspace, I considered what we were doing to be better than art.

This attitude was born out of disgust with contemporary art and its context, the art world. Going online felt like we were abandoning that sinking ship. From one day to the next, I dropped all of my analog creation and turned my back on museums and galleries.

At the same time, the distance between my graphic design work and my art suddenly vanished. Probably because working with an interactive medium implied working for people, and that implied design. And because in the early days of the web, one could get away with a lot more daring designs than one can now. In those days, it was only when we failed to achieve our creative goals that we called our work art.

But when working with videogames as a medium (as of 2002), I felt gradually pushed back into the idea of art. In part because our approach to game making deviated so much from conventions that it could only be explained as art. But also because videogames embraced a very old fashioned idea of art (beauty, emotion, etc) that I found a lot more palatable than what is considered artistic in contemporary fine art circles.

After ten years, however, I feel ready to go back. I have learned a lot. Playing the artist is a very enriching experience. I highly recommend it.

The videogames context has changed as well. Creating a game that is just meant to be beautiful or meaningful has now become acceptable. Gamers have become a lot more appreciative of videogames that are not about challenges and rewards. The medium -dare I say it?- seems to have matured a bit.

So now I can go back to that thing I wanted to make in the first place. That thing that is better than art. That thing that can only be done in the interactive medium, where you can think with your fingers and where your brain is always connected to the hive mind of the cosmos. Where suffering ceases to exist and all is joy.

I think Bientôt l’été wil be the last art game I will make. I’m kind of sick of being an artist. And Bientôt l’été has offered me sufficient opportunity for narcissism. I think I can do without for a while now. Maybe for the rest of my life.

I feel that with Bientôt l’été I will have said all I have to say as an artist. I’m very happy to have this opportunity. But after this I will be empty.

I will not stop creating. I have many plans. But I want to make things for other people now, not for myself or for how I think people should be. In a way this is far scarier than making art. If people don’t like your art, you can always think that they don’t get it or that it’s not to their taste or that it’s simply art for a small elite. As an artist you can afford to be mean spirited and contrary.

But if you make things for people, with the express purpose that they would enjoy them, if you try to give people beauty and then they reject your work. Ouch! That must hurt. I hope it doesn’t happen to me.

The visual logic of Bientôt l’été is starting to be messy. Several system have been redesigned multiple times and fragments of old logic are still present here and there, in case I change my mind. Systems are also entangled with each other more than they probably should be in an attempt to control what should be running at which time.

All of this is a result of designing the game while programming it. And I should probably remake the whole thing. But there’s no time.

In the future, I’ll schedule two production phases: one in which I figure out the design and that ends with alpha-testing and tweaking. And a second one in which the entire game is built again from scratch, according to the specifications defined in the previous phase. I imagine this second phase could be quite fast. It’s generally easy to program something if you know what the end result should be.

Prototyping is not sufficient as a first phase for the types of videogames that we want to make. Because our games are not just about interactions but rely on all facets of the software (visuals, sounds, processes, interactions, etc) for full impact. And it is especially important for testing the game on potential players that this impact can be achieved. I imagine for other games, testing if the players are having fun is sufficient. And I imagine this can be done through interaction testing alone. But we have other expectations.

Prototyping is also horrible if you are hoping to achieve a relatively specific mood. Playing around with placeholder graphics opens up a whole range of possibilities, most of which are simply not suitable or not feasible in the project at hand. This leads to frustration. Also, focusing purely on interaction tends to happen in a sort of cultural vacuum. You start creating things that feel nice, that have a certain basic emotional effect, that appeal to our animal instincts. But, apart from the fact that I find this very difficult to do, technically and design-wise, this is just not where I see our work. I’d much rather have broken mechanics in a virtual world that resonates with the player’s life experiences, than build an absurd world around some mechanics that happen to feel nice.

Videogames are a popular medium. What I am trying to do with Bientôt l’été is ridiculous. I’m approaching the medium wrong. I’m too idealistic. I’m looking at the technology and seeing its potential and then acting upon that as an individual. This individual happens to have greater love for high literature and deep art cinema than for pop music or television. So when I follow my heart I make stuff that doesn’t really fit in a popular medium.

It’s a bit embarrassing. Like reading poetry on MTV. Or a comic strip in which only ordinary things happen. Or an honest pop song. One might think it is heroic to do such things. But they miss their effect on the audience of such popular media. And if one is not willing to address its audience, one shouldn’t use a medium.

A medium is more than a technology. It’s also a group of people with access to it. It’s still possible to create meaningful art in a popular medium. One should just not be too up front about it.

To be effective, there needs to be a clear appeal to the sensitivities of the audience. Clear, and simple. Don’t overwhelm them, don’t confuse them. Give them a rich top layer that can be thoroughly enjoyable without any thought or reflection. Chances are, more of your art will get through to them this way than if you simply confront them with it (even if they are part of the intellectual connoisseur elite!). And even if not, at least they enjoyed the ride.

I don’t regret making Bientôt l’été. I’m immensely proud of it. It’s something I needed to do. Maybe even something that needed to be made. But I think after this I’m ready to address the medium with its baggage. I think I have found an approach, an attitude, a state of mind to use this medium, in a sense, more respectfully. More respectful of the audience that already exists for it. And I don’t think this requires violent graphics or rigid game structures. People have been sick of that for ages.

Chances are no one will notice the difference. But for me it’s night and day. Instead of fighting the medium, I’ll just use what it already does well and mould that to serve my purpose. It’s a happier way of working, more positive, additive. To make something nice, and add a little bit of spice.

I think I am now old enough for that. And I will lean back in my rocking chair and nod encouraging smiles to a new generation of creators who will make fools of themselves, like I did -at least I hope they do, because somebody should!

Having pre-orders that allow access to an unfinished version of the game removes some of the nervousness I tend to feel before release. Usually I’m very eager to show our work to the world. This is probably one of the reasons why we are so good with deadlines. It’s not that we’re that great at scheduling. We’re simply very curious to hear what people think of what we’ve made.

I do want to get Bientôt l’été out of the door. If only because I want to move on to the next project. But I’m a lot more relaxed about it than usual. And if I need more time to get the game sufficiently polished, I will take it. And I won’t let that stop me from starting other projects anyway.

The people whose opinion I’m most eager to hear already have access to the game. It’s nice if other people can have a look as well. And they will. All in good time.

Of course the current alpha is not finished. But when is a game ever finished? The bulk is there. The finished version will be better. But not radically different. So the responses we get now should be representative of how the final release will new received. And I’m quite satisfied.

One of the questions that came out of the feedback on the alpha version of Bientôt l’été was if there was going to be a sort of conclusion to the game, an end, closure.

When thinking about it, I cannot but agree that this would most probably improve the emotional impact of the game. I have fond memories of playing videogames that end. A satisfying ending gives the entire experience that happened before a sense of depth in meaning. And it tells players they can stop now, they have seen what there is to see, the show is over, hope you liked it.

But this conflicts terribly with how I think as a creator of these things. I make systems, creatures, little machines that are either on or off, alive or dead. And when they are alive, they just do what they do, ad infinitum.

There’s no story, no reason. It’s just a situation, a construction, designed for inspection. I like creating worlds, systems, things that live and that respond to your presence. But I have no point to make. On the contrary. I design these devices in order to find points. And any points I find are always only temporary. It’s about playing with meaning. Not about finding the truth. But about imagining “What if this or that were true?”

Attaching an end to this, exhausting the possibilities, stopping the experiment seems incongruous. And yet I cannot deny the potential emotional impact of closure, even if it is utterly false. The choice between honesty and beauty is one of the hardest I know.

I had to describe our company the other day and for the first time I couldn’t bring myself to call Tale of Tales an independent studio. I just said the truth and called us a small studio instead.

Independent always was a proud way of saying small for me anyway. But today, every other studio is calling itself independent. Indie seems to have become a synonym of cool, disregarding whether you’re big or small or whether publishers or investment firms fund your production.

At the same time, the regular games industry has become as lot more accepting of small development teams. Probably because some games developed by small teams have become commercially successful. And maybe also because there is no end to the fast descent of AAA towards the deepest possible boredom, encouraging each and every employee of such a studio to at least consider “going indie” once in a while.

Maybe we should give the term back to the hobby game developers. The creators who are truly independent, who work without budgets, live off the goodwill of partner or parents and give their games away for free.

Since it doesn’t seem likely that independent will ever mean the same in games as it does in music or cinema. We’re just too much of a business for that. We just have too little artistic blood in our veins. We’re not adventurous enough. We like numbers too much.