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!

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 very grateful that people are actually taking the time to play the alpha build of our game and share their impressions and ideas. A lot of interesting things have come up that I really would not have seen so clearly without their help.

I’m still expecting some reactions that I’m especially curious about but a few issues have already surfaced.

The collecting interaction is still not right. Moving away from explicit finding and collecting of objects on the beach was a good choice. But the current replacement of phrases gliding over the screen and standing still to collect them is just not clear. So I’ll be experimenting with different ways of doing this.

There’s a problem with using the phrases in the conversation in the café as well. Currently, you just get a list of the phrases you have collected and you select one to speak it. This stimulates a form of goal-orientation that is not compatible with my vision for the game.

The pure keyboard controls also don’t seem to be ideal, or have the desired emotional effect. Several players prefer the experimental mouse controls, often claiming it makes the experience feel less game-like.

Suggestions have been made to show the ghost of another player on the beach. Not sure how I feel about that yet. Maybe I just need to experiment with it and see.

Currently, there is no end to the beach. You can just keep going, and part of the beach moves along with you. Some people like this but others feel that, since there is nothing new to discover, you might as well make them stop in some way. I’ll have to think about this.

Some suggestions are good but would require too much work to implement. I’d prefer to keep the number of features small but polish them really well. If, however, Bientôt l’été would do well commercially, I’ll probably want to work on some of these ideas anyway and release them in a new version, or as additional content. Especially being able to interact more with another player is attractive to me.

I do realize that the people who are currently playing and commenting are a narrow selection particularly interested in this sort of game. But I’m still happily surprised by how common it has become to simply enjoy a game for its atmosphere and mood. It’s such a joy not to have to fight for the right of a videogame to not have puzzles or enemies anymore.

The first alpha build has been sent out to people who have pre-ordered Bientôt l’été. And even though I know that through the act of pre-ordering without even seeing a screenshot, these people show more than average sympathy towards our work, I’m nervous as hell.

At first there was the fear of disappointment. I was, and still am, fully prepared to refund anyone who does not enjoy the game. I am also worried that people may not understand the game. Bientôt l’été is awfully calm and understated, and probably more conceptual than anything we ever released. I don’t think I’ll be making art games for a while after this. It’s nerve-racking.

But mostly, I’m embarrassed to admit it, I’m nervous about rejection, about failure. And I know this is stupid and that I need to fight it. In videogames personal taste is almost non-existent. Games are either right or wrong. And if you make a game that people don’t like, your game is wrong. If you make a game that isn’t massively successful, it’s because it’s a bad game.

And I know that is not how I feel about other media. You like that kind of music, I like these kinds of books. We are happy for each other that we both find something we like, but neither one of us is wrong, and neither are the creators of these works. They do what they do and some people enjoy it and others don’t.

Anyway, releasing an early alpha has a purpose: to collect responses to the game. And even though I would infinitely rather hear gushing praise and reports on how much people love Bientôt l’été, what matters now is making the game as good as it can be. And for that I need to hear criticism, I need to hear what people do not like about it. And then I need to judge if it can be fixed without altering the purpose of the piece, or conflicting with my own preferences.

The latter is important because I do not see Bientôt l’été as a commercial release. It needs to be good, on its own terms, not necessarily as widely successful as possible (I’ll reserve that ambition for another future project). It needs to be good in the way that I think videogames can be good. And I know that my taste is not exactly mainstream.

I like that Proteus and Kairo offer an alpha build of the game well before release. I am now considering this for Bientôt l’été.

There’s two reasons why I want to do this. And one why I may not: if people don’t like the unfinished game they may never give the finished one a chance when it’s done.

However, we are talking about only a very small group of people that is interested in playing unfinished versions of games. So not much harm done if they don’t like it. Some people in this small subset may, however, like the game, and if they do, they might be very keen on spreading the word about it. And that is the best publicity an independent developer can get.

I also want to hear reactions to the game, before we confront “the masses” with it. I worry about Bientôt l’été. I have no idea how people will respond. The little experience I’ve had so far with collaborators playing the game, has been tremendously helpful already to help improve the game so many more future players will enjoy it. I want more such feedback.

I’m thinking of releasing a build of the game that doesn’t include some of the features that still need a lot of work. So this build would feel fairly polished and would be fairly stable. It would just be missing some parts. Which would help to keep people interested and curious. And it would also help optimize the simple core of the game. If that part is good, not much can go wrong by adding the missing features.

So, would you buy an alpha build of Bientôt l’été? And if so, would you share your feelings about it with us? Would you share them with your friends?

This occurred to me:

I don’t like free. If I enjoy your product, I want to pay for it. Because I want to show my gratitude and because I want to support your continued production. If I don’t enjoy your product, I don’t even want it for free.

I don’t know beforehand if I will enjoy a product. Refunds could solve this problem. But there’s still a barrier, of course. It’s not pleasant to pay for something just to try it. That takes all the fun out of shopping!

A compromise is to offer a free trial version of the product. Digital content can be distributed very cheaply. In fact, when a customer downloads “free” software, they are paying for the low cost of distribution -or at least of transportation- themselves.

The downside of the try-before-you-buy concept is that the producer is encouraged to make the trial version persuade you in some way to buy the full version. This can happen by simply making the trial very good, which is honest if the full product is of equal quality. But it also happens, and tends to be more lucrative, in all sorts of less honest ways.

So what I have been considering for Bientôt l’été is to allow the customer to pay for the product after playing it. You would be able to download the full game and I would only require payment when you’re done. If you didn’t like the product, you don’t pay and remove it from your hard drive. No harm done.

I realize that this potentially opens the gates for abuse. But I may be willing to take that risk. Abuse happens anyway. People pirate software, for instance. I also hope that the audience for my work possesses a more than average sense of responsibility and ethics. That they would only be content with themselves if they behave decently. And finally, I think that if you treat people like civilized human beings, perhaps there is a better chance that they will act as such.

If all goes well, Bientôt l’été will be released 3 years after our previous desktop game (Fatale) was released. Production of Bientôt l’été should only take 9 months, though. Before we started on Bientôt l’été, we made an iPhone game, we created prototypes for two new games and worked on a collaborative project with Alex Mayhew (of Ceremony of Innocence fame).

None of those projects have lead to a release yet, but I now notice that several of the ideas developed in that period, have found there way into Bientôt l’été.

The sci-fi layer comes straight from Cncntrc. The chessboard on the café table with objects that you can move around comes from the experiments we did on iPad with Alex. And the graphical user interface, including the textual hints, is similar to what we have developed for The Book of 8.

I don’t have very fond memories of the prototyping period. I came away from that project with a rather negative attitude towards prototyping. The problem with prototyping, at least the way we did it, is that it’s endless. You can make many prototypes and never know if they’re any good. And there’s always something that can be improved, so there’s always more experimental work that can be done with placeholder graphics. Which is rather irrelevant when you do work like ours in which visual impact plays such an important role.

But we did learn a lot in that period. Next to the concrete ideas mentioned above, that knowledge is also being poured into Bientôt l’été. Even the dislike of prototyping has had a rather positive effect on Bientôt l’été‘s production. It pushed us towards figuring out a concrete buildable design. This lead to a reductionist aesthetic that I’m quite happy with. And also to a design approach that eschews theoretical “on paper” design in favor of creating systems in the game engine based on how they feel. It’s the closest we’ve ever worked to our ideal situation of “the game is always finished, all we do is refine it”.

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.

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.