I’m very happy with how many people have pre-ordered Bientôt l’été so far. Despite zero advertising or publication, 140 people have done so. And surprisingly to me, most of them have purchased the “Extravagant” package that costs 4 times more. I really feel supported and encouraged by this display of trust. Thank you all!

This makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to indeed make games for a very small group of people and sell them simply at the price that is required to cover the production cost. A game that costs 50,000 Euros to make would only need 500 players willing to pay 100 Euros for it. Imagine how special a game could be if it is made for such a small group of people! Maybe nobody outside of this group would get it, but who cares? It would be wonderful for those within!

Many people have also sent in feedback to the game, which has been very helpful. It’s giving me more work than expected but I do feel that the game will turn out better, clearer, more precise. It makes me feel a lot more confident that perhaps when the second alpha is ready, we should publicize it a little bit more, to spread the word.

Because there’s also something to say for reaching people outside of the elite. People unfamiliar with this type of game, with this type of pleasure. Or people who only know it from other media.

In any case, thanks to everyone who pre-ordered Bientôt l’été! It’s highly appreciated!

I’m afraid I might not care about interaction anymore. The thought came to me as I was tweaking Bientôt l’été in response to alpha-test feedback.

For some reason I cannot recall -or maybe there was none- you collect things in one part of this game which you then use in another. What was I thinking? What’s the point?

I’ve designed several ways both for collecting and using these items. It apparently doesn’t matter to me exactly how you collect or use them. I only care about the effect.

I wanted to create a conversation constructed with more or less random French phrases. That’s the entire reason why Bientôt l’été exists.

Not that only having this conversation would have satisfied me. I care deeply about the environment we have created, the mood, the sound, the visual appearance.

I’m happy enough with the walking activity on the beach. Though I couldn’t care less about how exactly you control the avatar. I wish players could just design and use their own preferred way of navigating.

Maybe we need another type of platform for this kind of work. A 3D world exploration platform that gives the author complete control over how the world and its inhabitants (including the avatar) look and behave. But that allows the user to do whatever they wish in it (within the limitations of their avatar).

Bientôt l’été has already been a very interesting learning experience for me. Here’s some of the things that I have discovered. These are not necessarily universal ideas, just things that are important for me, for the kind of work I want to make, within the limitations I have to deal with. And not necessarily things that will find direct application in Bientôt l’été, but more so in future projects.

Don’t do realism.
The closer you get to realism, the easier the graphics can be ignored. Plus realism always creates expectations that the game can not deliver on. And it is where the work deviates from reality that meaning is born.

Make one thing only, avoid structure.
Just make one situation, one environment. Otherwise you need some kind of structure to switch between the different situations. And that creates technical and narrative complications that are best avoided. Plus you spread your resources thin.

Avoid interactivity.
Designing interactivity is a pain in the neck. The player should not be required to do something in order to achieve something that is required to make progress or whatever. Design the environment assuming the player wil do nothing. And make that interesting. Any interactivity that flows logically out of the situation is fine. Just don’t assume that any is needed.

Schedule two production cycles.
One before and one after alpha-testing. For the kind of work that we do, in which the experience relies a lot on atmosphere, a videogame needs to have a certain level of completion before it can be tested and evaluated. If a lot of changes seem appropriate after testing, there needs to be sufficient time to implement them. Just assume that you will be making the game twice, or making two games.

Joy is more important than art.
Forget about being original or challenging players’ assumptions. This stuff always backfires. Just try to make something nice for people. If the work is made in sincerity, it will automatically contain worthwhile artistic elements. Ultimately, in all honesty, pleasing players satisfies me more than confusing them.

Don’t make a multiplayer art game.
For people to play together, there needs to be a sufficient amount of them. The more people play the game, the more chance a player will run into another player. If you make a game that wil not attract a large audience, multiplayer doesn’t make much sense. Not without a strategy to bring players together.

I’m reading Le Vice-Consul at the moment in which Anne-Marie Stretter plays an important role. Anne-Marie Stretter, the wife of the ambassador of France in colonial India. Not unlike Anne Desbaresdes, the wife of the factory owner in Moderato Cantabile. The latter only has one lover. The former has several. She is mentioned as such in the beginning of L’amant de la Chine du Nord as well. Not much more is said of her. And the novel goes on, throwing a poor white school girl in the lusting arms of a wealthy Chinese gentleman.

In Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Anne-Marie Stretter is the older woman who seduces the fiancé of the lead character away from her, casting her into a ten year long depression. The name of that fiancé is Michaël Richardson. In Le Vice-Consul, one of the lovers of Anne-Marie Stretter is called Michael Richard. She seems to prefer him.

I’m now in a part of the novel where Anne-Marie Stretter is on a beach (yes, a beach, as in many other novels of Duras and in Bientôt l’été). She is lying in a chair surrounded by her lovers. The men talk and she sleeps. She remains the sphinx, even when she is the center of attention. And she taints every other story with her presence, even if only featured casually, in the margins.

There’s also several films by Duras in which Mrs Stretter makes an appearance, highlighting other aspects of this elusive character. Makes me want to make a videogame about her. But I don’t know enough about her. That’s sort of the point and the beauty of Anne-Marie Stretter. Can we make a game about something unknown and yet familiar? How do we allude in videogames?

Aesthetically, videogames have more in common with figurative painting than they do with film. As long as videogames attempt to mimic film, they will remain inferior to it. And quite frankly, their output will always remain dangerously close to kitsch.

We need to accept that the images we produce are synthetic and not photographic. That moves our medium away from cinema but brings it closer to pre-photography figurative painting. Instead of watching films, we should be studying renaissance and baroque paintings.

I say “pre-photography” because I feel that photography has ruined the art of painting. And more problematically for us, photography has also ruined our capacity to enjoy realistic synthetic figurative images. But perhaps videogames can rekindle this.

Pre-modern oil painting is not so much about making pictures, it seems to me. It’s about generating sensations. It’s more about presenting textures and atmospheres than it is about representing visible reality. And this is what brings this art form very close to videogames.

What the synthetic image lacks in visual fidelity, it more than makes up for in the power of suggestion, in stimulating the imagination, in reminding of touch and smell.

Photographic images are nice. But synthetic images are much more powerful. Photographic images are also easy to forget because they look like reality and we don’t need art to see reality. But a synthetic image is unique, is completely created by the artist. There’s no need to hide that under pretending that the image is a photograph. We should take pride in the synthetic nature of our medium. It brings us closer to Michelangelo and Rubens than to snap shots and home videos.

Currently, to play with somebody else in Bientôt l’été, you enter the café on the dyke and go sit at a table. When you do that, the game checks if somebody is already sitting at a table somewhere, waiting, and if so you connect to them. If not, you wait.

I just realized that there’s a problem with this design. If the availability of connecting to another player depends their patience to wait, the window for finding somebody else will be extremely small. And given that Bientôt l’été is not the kind of game that will attract enormous crowds —so that there’s always somebody to play with— I need to increase that window somehow.

There is literally nothing to do while you wait either. I guess I could let you to have a virtual drink and smoke on your own, Dinner Date-style, but how long will that remain amusing without adding a lot more to the game.

We already have “a lot more”, though. We have an entire beach. So perhaps your “waiting” starts already while you’re alone on the beach. And then when somebody enters the café, you are notified of this and you can decide to join them. This notification should not be too personal, though (like your character’s cell phone ringing). That would conflict with the pleasant solitude of the beach situation.

Maybe the appearance of the café on the beach changes for all players when somebody has entered and is available to play together. So you would regularly look at the café and if, say, the light is on, you can enter yourself. If multiple players responded simultaneously, they can all be matched up in couples by the game.

Since you know that this light will go on in other players’ games when you enter the café, you would normally not have to wait too long until somebody connects to you —at least if somebody else is playing the game at that moment (which is a lot more likely if “playing the game” includes the beach scene, and is not limited to “waiting at the table”). So that makes it acceptable to enter the café even is nobody is there yet.

I have lost my faith in design documents. I have probably lost my faith in design altogether. At least when it comes to designing videogames on paper before making them. Instead I prefer to build whatever small idea I have and then let the game itself inspire me to make design decisions.

There’s always a lot of things that the game seems to ask from you. If there’s a tree, it wants to sway in the wind, if there’s walking, it wants the sound of foot steps, if there’s talking, it wants touching, et cetera. There’s no need to really think about design. Just respond to what the game is asking and make it.

However! There’s two problems with this approach. One is logistical. There’s of course limitations to how much time and resources you can spend on adding this sort of logical detail. But more interestingly, there’s an artistic problem too.

If you simply implement whatever the game seems to be asking from you, you will probably end up with a natural feeling simulation. But, as discussed here before, naturalistic realism is the straight path to indifference. The more your simulation approaches reality, the less players are going to find it impressive. It just starts to look normal. And normal they see every day around them.

So one should be very careful when complying with the demands of the game and continuously ask if the implementation of this or that actually serves the artistic purpose of the game. If you want to create a hot and calm atmosphere, perhaps the tree shouldn’t sway at all. If you want to talk about disconnection and loneliness, your characters should probably not touch each other. Even if this looks unnatural, and especially if it does, such decisions will help express the mood you are trying to establish.

The golden rule seems to be that it is where art deviates from reality that meaning emerges.

I created a “cyber-café” yesterday, for the two-player part of Bientôt l’été. Removed the characters, the wooden table, the drawer, the chess pieces and replaced the scene by an abstract grid with chess piece icons. It didn’t work. When we play-tested among ourselves, we just missed the realistic feel too much.

Players will just have to accept that the realistic look is just a lie of sorts. They won’t be able to look around, or see much of the characters, or put their hands on the table. The interaction is rigid and systematic, despite of the realistic look. But the scene feels nicer to us this way than a purely abstract screen.

The cyber-café game was interesting, though. I changed the interaction so that the quotes from Marguerite Duras that you collected on the beach, are more connected to the chess pieces you find near mysterious “apparitions”. So we’re going to keep that, for now. Playing a sort of unruly chess game as interface to a conversation is fun.

Though I hate having to design interactions at this point. It’s a very time consuming process and hard to schedule.

Minimalism is an odd beast. There is no end to it. That is its very own excess. There is always something that can be removed.

I have already reduced the amount of features in the landscape of the exterior. The beach is blank, there’s only one building and one character and a bunch of gulls. No clouds, no hills, no trees. And now I’m hacking into the interior scene. Removing all of its realistic features in favor of a completely symbolic screen. Soon there will be nothing left of Bientôt l’été!

I’m extremely happy with the comments that players of the alpha are sending in. Many of them help me identify and fix issues in the current design. This will certainly lead to a better piece than I could have made with only my own instincts to go on. Sometimes, when on your own, you simply overlook things. Also, the frequency at which certain issues occur in comments of different people, helps me judge priorities.

Though it can feel frustrating at times as well. Some comments recur and although I agree with them, I may not be able to fix the problem within the scope of this project. The suggestions that people make are great, I would love to see them in the game, but it’s impossible to implement them given budget and time available.

One could say just increase the budget and then the extra profits generated by a better game will make up for the higher production cost. But my mind doesn’t work like that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life refining a single idea. There’s other things I want to make. I want to move on. Time is a more important factor to me than money. I cannot add years to my lifespan.

So perhaps the smarter strategy is to change the design in order to prevent the issues from occurring.

For instance, several players have mentioned feeling a certain discomfort with the café interior scene. They want to see the other player, they want to see more of the interior, they want to put their hands on the table, they want more control over the conversation, etc. All of these are valid and I completely agree that they would improve that scene. But I don’t think I can get all this done on time.

I think these issues are caused by the scene creating an expectation of fidelity that the game then does not deliver on. So maybe a cheaper solution is to not create this expectation. In this case, perhaps the interior scene should be more abstract, more stylized, more symbolic. Maybe the characters should not be visible at all. And maybe the table should not look so realistic. Maybe this should look more like a game, a board game, a game with abstract tokens, that takes place in the holodeck layer.

I don’t know yet. I personally like the realism in this scene. So I may ultimately leave it, optimize it where feasible, and leave the rest as a simple difference in taste. We’ll see.

A question still remains. Maybe it is a good sign that people have expectations. Maybe this means that the scene did work to some extent, that it did touch them in some way. And perhaps a more stylized presentation, while potentially less problematic, may not touch them. Is this a choice between unfulfilled desire and no desire at all? Can a work of art take the risk of imperfection?

While I am rather pleased with the look of this scene, none of the playtesters have made a comment on it. Maybe this is one of those cases where realism just goes unnoticed and thus is hardly worth the effort. Maybe it’s more interesting if the beach scene is the closest we get to realism in the game, its aesthetics being far less conventional.