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.

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.

I understand the joy of power fantasies. But I find fragility often far more interesting and beautiful.

The normal structure of videogames allows us to continuously feel like a winner. When we drop out of the flow channel and are confronted with situations that are not challenges that can be overcome, we may be confused and uncertain. But that is when we become sensitive to many other forms of beauty and joy.

Lack of power is not necessarily sad. Power feels good because it makes us feel superior to others. But lack of power feels good because it makes us feel connected to others. Per definition, there can only be one winner of any competition. Per that same definition, most of us are losers.

But only if we choose to see our existence as competition. There is absolutely no need for that. When we stop thinking in such terms, suddenly the world becomes much richer and more varied and nuanced. Suddenly feelings of confusion and doubt become pleasurable. If only because we know they are shared feelings.

Lack of power is liberating. When we refuse to run the race any further, we suddenly feel the sensation of the gravel underneath our feet, hear the wind in the trees, notice the myriad colors in the sunset.

Even our unfulfilled desires, our frustrations and wishes become beautiful. We are at our most noble when we long, when we desire, when there is something outside of us that is out of our reach.

Bientôt l’été is not a love story. It’s not about two people who meet and fall in love and then break up. Instead it’s a story about that story. We, the players, all know what love is. And in the videogame, we can explore these emotions, we can play with the things that we, humans, say and think about love. It’s not real. It’s a game.

Through this playing, hopefully, we will discover some of the beautiful shades that emotions can have outside of the narrow range of power, victory and success. We can be fragile, with each other. We can be mystified, feel dumb, feel ugly and inadequate, and laugh about it. Laugh, yes, because existence on this planet is wonderful. Even our capacity for suffering and sadness is beautiful, is wondrous.

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.