I have redone the in-game hints and instructions to match with the interaction redesign and the new focus on mouse controls rather than keyboard. They almost seem redundant now that the interactions have become so simple.

But I don’t want players to not know how to play. Exploration is fun but exploration of controls is not very interesting. It is also completely meaningless.

I dislike telling people how to play, though. And it’s quite hard to build a robust context-sensitive real-time hint system. I’m beginning to see the advantage of using conventional controls. Maybe I should see if I can’t use those in a future game.

Unless learning the controls can somehow become a sort of playing. Extending the honest expression of the fakeness of the game in Bientôt l’été through the holodeck device, one could make learning how to control the avatar part of the story.

Maybe we could even let the player design the controls in game. For each action that the avatar can do, the game asks the player how they want to execute that action. Or better, the avatar asks the player.

I want to move away from the avatar as simulated human anyway. Avatars are simple creatures with rigid logic. Maybe we can admit that to the player. Their stupidity could perhaps be charming and might stimulate a desire in the player to help them. Or at least to play along better.

That way it wouldn’t be the game that teaches the player how to interact. Instead, the player would figure out together with the avatar how to play.

A brief Twitter discussion about authors admitting to the fictional nature of their work, made me realize that I do not think of our games as fictions. We create them to be part of reality.

We don’t tell stories. Our characters are not real people. But they are also not stand-ins for real people. They are themselves. At best they refer to archetypes, fictional characters, without becoming one themselves. I see our characters as actual creatures, with a certain form of life. Creatures with whom you can have a relationship.

Not all depictions are fictional. A photo of a landscape is not fictional because the landscape it depicts really exists. How about a painting of a landscape? And what about the painting as an object? An object of beauty that gives us real pleasure. The painting itself is not fictional. It really exists. In our world.

That’s how I think of our games. They really exist. They are digital, yes. And that allows them to exist in many copies. But it is still existence. Not representation.

I think this sets videogames apart from movies. In movies, the characters are necessarily fictional because they are played by an actor who is not the character. But videogames do not have this ambiguity. There is no actor. The character is wholly itself. It is not being played by somebody else. It exists as this creature who is part of this world.

Initially the concept of a game may be a fiction, imagined by humans. But as soon as the world is built and the characters are created, they become real. They are no longer fictional. The characters may seem to live in this strange world that is not ours. But they also live in our world, just as the game world exists in our world. The gameworld is as much a part of our world as the bowl of fruit on the table.

It makes me very happy to hear people say that they enjoy our videogames. I’m glad that they can look past the faults in our work and find the thing that we intended the games to be.

There’s something inherently frustrating about creating with videogames technology. Everything is always a lot of work. And the only way to get even close to excellence is to throw buckets of cash at problems. Sadly those buckets tend to come with conditions and expectations that usually end up neutralizing the effect of the excellence (i.e. a pretty skin on a dead carcass).

Like the players who find ways to enjoy our work despite their lack of such excellence, we as developers need to find ways of approaching our vision without actually being able to execute it.

It’s almost like making a simulation of a simulation. Maybe in our next game you will play a gamer who plays a videogame. And then you simply imagine how great the fictional videogame is that your gamer-avatar is playing.

Perhaps this explains the emptiness in Bientôt l’été. We can’t really make the beautiful game that should exist, but we can allude to it, we can hint at it, we can evoke an emotional impression of it. Maybe that’s enough. It should be enough. It better be enough.

I wish I could switch to fine tuning already. I yearn for that feeling of control. To polish the game until it is perfect. But from the looks of my to do list, there will not really be time for that before the planned released date of October. There’s a lot of small functional things and minor features I need to deal with. I may need to postpone release to have enough time for polish.

We have never done this before. We have always released on time. This is the first time in our existence as a company that we could actually afford to give ourselves more time. And I have scheduled for a buffer period before we start the next project. So maybe I should take my time with Bientôt l’été.

There tends to be something very mechanical about the behavior of synthetic characters in videogames. This is caused by their logic being driven by the very rigid processes that we can feasibly describe in computer code. One could argue that we just need to multiply our efforts and resources to make these characters look and behave more like the creatures they are supposed to represent. Or one could reject the desire for realism entirely and simple stick to non-human characters, or characters presented in a simplified visual style so that their rigid behavior doesn’t seem odd.

Both approaches have their merits and I do want to see people exploring them. But ultimately, wouldn’t we all be better off if we could simply accept that the creatures on our screens are synthetic? They are not really humans, not really animals, not really plants. Nor photographic representations of them. They are just fabrications inspired by such creatures that may recall such creatures in our mind. If they possess some kind of life, then they are an entirely new form of life. Simpler perhaps than we are, but still quite useful in our artistic endeavors.

If we just accept that these fake characters will have fake behaviors, we will enjoy our videogames much more. A well done simulation is of course a beautiful thing to witness. But if our synthetic actors don’t quite succeed in imitating our behavior exactly, maybe we should just cut them some slack. After all, they only have human-created systems to fall back on, unlike our own organic systems which we did not make ourselves. I think they’re doing pretty well given the circumstances. They have God nor evolution, and yet they have life and manage to move and amuse us from time to time.

Addressing item after item on my to do list is going remarkably well. But I’m a bit anxious about what Bientôt l’été will be like after all these changes. I don’t have time to play it. I just continue to add and fix individual elements without knowing very well how this will impact the whole.

This is kind of exciting because the game remains an unexplored mystery for me too this way. But it’s nerve-wracking to not know. Chances are I won’t be able to thoroughly play the game before release of the next test version. So I will become one of the alpha testers myself. Let’s just hope the program doesn’t start crashing.

I am happy with the opportunity that the new point-and-click navigation on Bientôt l’été‘s beach offers to just watch the game and think, dream, empathize. We’re often so obsessed with interactivity when making videogames that we underestimate the power of doing nothing, the luxury of just being able to watch something and allow all our energy to flow to our thought processes.

I click a distant point on the beach and my avatar starts walking towards it. I release the mouse, lean my head on my hands and watch. The waves float in, texts appear, a solitary gull in the sky. The world is alive. There is nothing movie-like about this experience, despite a superficial similarity.

I watch my avatar from the back. Nothing in her body language betrays any response. But I know how this sight makes her feel, how the words touch her. How she wants to see more, feel more, even if it hurts. There is a strange sort of self-indulgent pleasure in emotional pain. It almost feels addictive.

I’m very pleased with this game. By reducing the activity, I think I have managed to capture the wonder of the very core of many videogames. We often forget how truly remarkable it is that we have these synthetic characters traversing virtual environments. This fascinates me so much more than any sort of gameplay.

My vacation is over. I want to get a second alpha release out of the door by the end of next week. Before the distraction of the Game Developers Conference in Cologne.

A lot of things have changed already. I want to hear some feedback now.

(Spoilers below!)

The mechanic for collecting phrases on the beach is different. Now it just happens automatically as phrases float in on the waves. And only after they have been collected do they appear in the sand. I liked the previous system with the phrases moving over the screen as you walk past and standing still to collect. But this appears to be completely unintuitive and subtle hints don’t suffice. So rather than ruining the experience by explaining the mechanic with hands and feet, I just removed it. It’s funny how the collection mechanic has gradually disappeared from the design.

The interface for speaking the phrases in the café has changed as well. Instead of clicking on the lines of a list with all collected phrases, the phrases are now tied to the fields of the chess board pattern on the table. So you speak the phrase that belongs to the field where you put down a chess piece. This makes the chess aspect a lot more prominent. I’m curious as to how people will respond to that.

I also want to tweak the networking system a bit and enable Apparitions and café exterior changes. Apparitions are items that appear on or next to the beach. There’s always only one. Some are small, others gigantic. Many refer to Marguerite Duras’ work and life. They are the places where you can collect chess pieces. The exterior of the café will also be different in every session. It starts small and becomes bigger in a few steps. And then it shrinks again. Here too, the buildings refer to Duras: there’s a café, a villa, a hotel, a casino and a colonial mansion.

I had originally considered finishing the visual aesthetics of the game first, so that I could spread screenshots and movies early. But after the results of the first alpha test, I’m eager to test the changes and additions. So I’m focusing on functionality for now.