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.

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!

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.

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.

Bientôt l’été draws more inspiration from Nouvelle Vague cinema than any of our previous games. In some ways it’s a tribute, even.

I adore Godard’s work and attitude in embarrassing amounts. Having just seen Le Mépris again fills me with doubt again about the position we should be taking with our work. Should we push the medium to its extreme in search of the sublime? Or should we try to address the desires of the public and, well, change the world? The fact that Godard calls Le Mépris a “traditional film” in the trailer, makes me think he struggled with similar doubts. And it’s comforting to see that a supposedly traditional approach did not prevent this film from becoming the masterpiece that it is. Maybe it even helped.

Still, what he does in that film is so far removed from what happens in videogames. One of the leading parts in Le Mépris is played by an aging Fritz Lang. And part of the subject matter is the conflict between art and commerce. Videogames have only just started understanding that they are an art form. We are a long way off from having senior games directors who can defend the art of videogames against the commercial demands of an industry. So maybe it’s just too early for any of this.

Also, when thinking how I could possibly make a videogame that is as bold, and humorous, and tragic and sublime as Le Mépris, I draw a blank. Despite the superficial similarity of displaying on a screen, the two mediums feel extremely different to me. I’m often jealous of how film can simply point a camera at reality and record it. The same effect in videogames would be utterly unaffordable.

But this is a different medium, and we have to find our own way. Not just in the craft of the art, but also in positioning our output in its cultural context. In many ways, videogames are far more exciting and flexible than film. And our times call for very different approaches to art.

The smaller the number of features in a videogame, the greater the chance that one of them will stand out. Painstakingly refined sounds of footsteps will be completely lost in a game world filled with activities. But if the world is silent and peaceful, suddenly we are able to enjoy, and enjoy deeply, a simple thing like the sound of footsteps.

As mentioned in a previous post, I believe it is wise to select one or two elements to be refined, while the rest of game can remain rather stylized.

A very detailed game world will be washed out in the experience. The trees will become a forest in the mind of the player and there will be no deep aesthetic enjoyment. It’s still possible to have a detailed world, as long as sufficient space is created for the important element to be enjoyed. Almost like isolating a painting on an otherwise blank wall to allow for maximum enjoyment.

The one special element needs to be rendered with sufficient detail. Most videogames contain a lot of elements but not a single one has sufficient detail. If you start focusing, every element in even some of the highest budget games is rigid in some way, and unsatisfying aesthetically. Resources are basically spread too thin to achieve deep beauty, heavily prioritizing quantity over quality.

I believe it’s better to choose a single element as the focus of the game, to give this element all the love and attention it needs to become as beautiful as possible. To increase economic feasibility as well as aesthetic effect, the fidelity of the other elements can be reduced. As well as their number. Remove the noise.

This stylization does not really apply to the composition of the screen. Videogames are not (abstract) paintings. They are worlds with objects in them. Proportion is important. Composition less so. Because the playing mind focuses on objects in a space, not on a picture.

Stories too need to be simple in a similar manner. There should be no plot, no twists, no structure. The focus is on being. There’s no need for detail in the narrative. Just a clear focus.

I thought this would never happen, but I’m starting to feel a little bit confident as a designer. As I’m reading through the comments and ideas that players of the alpha build of Bientôt l’été are so generously sharing, it surprises me how clear my opinions about them are. They’re all good suggestions, since the people currently playing the game are thoughtful and interested in more artistic uses of the medium (in other words nobody has suggested inclusion of a shotgun and zombies, not even as a joke). But it is very clear to me which suggestions work in my vision and which don’t.

Up until now, I was so insecure as a designer that I felt I had to program everything myself. I needed total control over the creation. But I have been considering another type of creation, where my role is more that of a director. And realizing that I now am able to discern between ideas gives me great confidence that such an approach might actually work, in a future project.

I have a strong memory of somebody playing an early demo of our very first games project and saying that she liked the sound of the avatar’s footsteps.

At that time, all videogames avatars’ steps made sounds. So we just copied what everybody else was doing. In most games, you hardly noticed. And if you did, the sounds might have been annoying, even. But because the activity in our game was so sparse and the atmosphere so calm, suddenly the simple sound of footsteps became a source of joy.

There’s a lesson in here that I’m only now slowly starting to fully understand.

Beauty can be very simple. The trick is to bring it out. Find a beautiful element and then remove anything that prevents the enjoyment of this beauty. Don’t be seduced to add more cool features or other things that would be nice. Find the one beautiful thing and show it. Forget about politics and rules and “proper use of the medium”. Beauty is your goal. Nothing else.

There’s an odd paradox in creating simulations: the better they are, the more they approach reality, the less impressive they become. It is very strange how, after meticulously fine-tuning the timing of sounds of a drawer sliding in Bienôt l’été, once it is done, I hardly notice it anymore. It’s only normal that the drawer makes a sound when it slides.

That doesn’t mean that players cannot be delighted by such small details. The trick seems to be to isolate them. Don’t design an entire world. It will just look like the real world and will not make much of an impression on all but the most dedicated experts. Stylize the environment and select a few things to bring into focus. Charm the player with beautiful detail in those things while muting everything around them.

Simplicity may be the key to dealing with the lack of subtlety in videogames.

I was half-hoping that Bientôt l’été could be a game about love, moving as a Hollywood tear jerker or a melancholic love song. Rather silly, of course, given Marguerite Duras as the main inspiration. Her work moves me when I read it, but only once in a while, in the little points that she makes, after unnoticeably building up to them. And these moments are never about the surrender or the ecstasy of love but more about accepting its complexity, and embracing the sadness as well as the joy.

This complexity shines through in Bientôt l’été, I think. But that still leaves The Game About Love on my to do list. I’ve learned something about how to approach it, though. The annoying thing about videogames is that they don’t lend themselves well to subtlety. That’s not so much caused by the limitations of the medium itself as by the wildly different ways in which people play videogames, and a greater sense of “ownership” of the experience, because of agency.

So The Game About Love will have to be extremely romantic, naive like a Disney movie, casting aside all doubts and complexities. That seems contradictory to the exciting openness that a procedural medium allows for. But it’s only logical that a creative desire to evoke a specific emotional effect clashes with that openness.

Our stance has always been to not force things too much, to allow people to have any emotional response to the work they like. And I’m still interested in that approach. But not for making The Game About Love. Then you have to be merciless, grab the hearts of the players and not let go until you’ve squeezed out every bit of tear they can muster.

It’s hard to call a deep emotional response to a work of art shallow, but in a way it is. Maybe it’s intellectually shallow when one emotion overwhelms, necessarily at the expense of any other reactions. As a result, such uncomplicated experiences may be somewhat forgettable. But that’s perfectly acceptable. There will always be the memory of the joy, even if the joy itself cannot be felt again by merely recollecting it.

We can’t leave videogames split into simple games about negative emotions and complex games about positive emotions. We also need simple games about positive emotions -and complex games about negative ones.

There’s something simple and gentle about love. And I hope to capture that in a future game.