We are not a commercially motivated studio. We are driven by artistic curiosity and a sense of obligation to explore a new medium on the one hand and create art that is relevant to our age on the other. But we have no interest in leaving the potential impact of our work solely up to chance. We want to reach as many people as possible. The fact that we know that only a small minority will actually enjoy what we make, makes this all the more important.

Since the major peak in sales is always at the launch of a game, it makes sense to attempt to maximize that peak. Not only for the sales on those days, but for the exponential effect on the rest of the sales of players spreading the word. The more sales a game has at launch time, the more it will have per day throughout its life time.

The few more artistic games that have done well commercially, all had extensive periods before launch in which people would be talking about the game. Sometimes this “hype” lasts over a year, before the game is released. A similar thing happens in the AAA sphere: games are talked about a lot a long time before they come out, and as soon as they have, the talking stops, the game disappears from the discussions.

Given this phenomena, it would make sense to sit on Bientôt l’été for a while before we release it. This is completely counter-intuitive. I’m eager to share my work with the world. But if I do this too early, apparently this world will be very small. I don’t mind as such, since Bientôt l’été is, strictly speaking, not a commercial game. But I think we should do our best to reach the biggest audience possible. If only to get the biggest possible amount of response, to inform our further evolution as artists and designers.

One could say that the “hyping” can already start now. In order to reach maximum potential by launch time. But that’s not how things seem to work in the indie sphere. Talking about a game only really takes off when the game looks and feels finished, through screenshots, videos and even playable versions. Anything else simply does not spread very far. And given the organic way in which we create our work, a representative version of Bientôt l’été will only exist on the day that it is finished.

I doubt if we will have the good sense to wait when the game is ready. It will have been a very long time since we published anything new. Surely we can all wait a bit longer. And yet, I can only imagine how eager we will be when Bientôt l’été is done.

Have you noticed how in almost all science fiction movies, computers are operated exclusively through keyboards? Instead of using a mouse, future people just rattle on the keyboard. I presume this is because it makes them look more like hackers.

Something similar may happen in Bientôt l’été. I want at least the main part of the game to be completely controllable with only the keyboard. There’s also going to be things that can be done with the mouse (especially the multiplayer part -the conversation at the café table) and perhaps I’ll throw in a gamepad interface. But you’ll definitely be able to begin playing the game by only using the keyboard.

The game starts with traveling through space, to the space station. So typing your way through the first few scenes, might enhance the feeling of being in a space craft, operating the mouseless computers of the future.

Sometimes, there are buttons on the screen that you can click. But you can also simply type the corresponding key on the button (a letter or an arrow). Next to the button there’s text explaining its function, in the language chosen by the player. It will be your own choice to navigate using the keyboard or not. Much like you will decide yourself how far you will travel in space, before you start playing -the first scene of the game is potentially endless: it generates planets and solar systems as you continue to fly through space.

There’s something very nice about controlling a game through the keyboard alone. In a way it feels more intimate, perhaps because of the association with writing. A mouse feels like an extension of the arm. As a result it keeps things at arm’s length. The cursor should feel like a fingertip but it rarely does. And in a game where you control the entire body of an avatar, mouse control, somehow, doesn’t make much sense.

PS: Only while proofreading this post do I realize how very appropriate a keyboard interface is for a game inspired by the work of a writer.

It may seem a bit redundant to have an avatar in a game while expecting the player to consider that character to represent him or her. If the player is going to be this main character, why not use a first person point of view?

The main reason in Bientôt l’été is to evoke a sense of touch.

Touch is the one sense that is sorely missed in our multimedia experiences. We can do without taste, and we may even be thankful that designers cannot use smell. But the lack of touch is often frustrating.

Technology has tried to make up for this lack somewhat with haptic feedback through vibrating controllers. And in first person games, we are all familiar with the bobbing camera when walking and jerky camera motions in response to the effects of violence. But the suggestion is never really convincing.

The thing that works best, in my mind, to suggest a sense of touch, is just showing the touching. It would be very difficult to suggest how the wind feels in a first person view. But when you can see how the clothes and hair of a character on screen are pulled by the wind, you get the idea. And if this character is supposed to represented you (because you can control it), then it’s not hard to imagine actually feeling this. Or at least conjuring up a memory in your imagination to what that feels like.

In the exterior, single player part of Bientôt l’été, you control the avatar through pretty standard third person navigation. The main activity in this part is collecting items that are washed up on the shore by the waves. Since these items are on the floor and sometimes quite small, they are not so easy to spot. Especially not if the avatar is obstructing your view. They may see the object, but you don’t because they are standing between you and it.

I would find myself always approaching things sort of sideways, rotating the camera around looking for items on the beach. And then it dawned on me: why don’t I just move the avatar to the side, so they’re not in my line of sight?

I had had this idea before, for the new version of 8. But the reason for using it there is to give the player the feeling that they are with the character, as a different person, symbolically holding her hand. That is not what I want in Bientôt l’été. The man or woman need to really be an avatar for the player, to navigate the holodeck through, not another person.

So I made a compromise.

While you’re walking, the camera slowly moves to the side. You hardly notice it, but it does allow a view of what’s ahead. The only tricky part is to snap the camera’s rotation center back to the avatar when turning around it and changing direction. Otherwise the camera makes annoying off center orbits. But it’s working fine. It adds a slightly spinning, sliding feeling that actually goes well with the dizzying effect of staring at the waves float in over the sand.

Coding is easy. If you know what you want, you just type it in and the program is done. At least that’s how I felt today when transcribing my visual Universe graphs to Javascript.

But I also realized that being creative is not something I can do in code. Typing in all the logic felt like locking in it all down into solid concrete that can never change again. As if the code, fluent while typing, instantly solidified into an arcane amalgamation of symbols that lose their meaning to humans as soon as they leave the fingers and become the exclusive domain of the machine.

This is a fine method when you know what you want.

But knowing what you want is a bad idea when it comes to interactive creation. When advertising uses the phrase “the limit is your imagination” they mean that the possibilities are endless and anything is possible. But in my experience, when dealing with interactive pieces, my imagination is a very real limitation. If you only create the videogames that you can imagine, you’re not going to get far. You need to get dirty. You need to program. You need to make the machine come alive and collaborate with it, play with it. Interactive things should be made in an interactive way.

And that just doesn’t work in code for me. I need visual tools. I need blocks to position, links to physically connect. I cannot play in a word processor. Copy paste is not my idea of creative interaction. When I see all of my work, when I see the relation between the logic and the game on the screen, the effect of the systems that are running, then I start seeing new combinations, I get ideas that go much further than my imagination.

Not just in the sense of “wacky ideas”, but in the much more useful sense of ideas that can actually be built. When you listen carefully to your game, it will tell you what it wants to be. It’s a bad idea to ignore that. And this sort of communication works so much better in a language I can comprehend.

Thanks to Antares Universe, I am programming again. Universe is a visual programming add-on for Unity3D. I have been using it virtually exclusively to program our prototypes and games since several months. Thanks to Universe, I have been able to get my hands dirty again with actually programming, with actually expressing ideas for interaction and procedures in working logic. As opposed to battling with the Javascript syntax checker and hurting my head trying to think of linear text as a way to represent non-linear logic.

When I’m programming in visually, all mistakes I run into are mistakes I have made myself. Logical mistakes, oversights, etc. As opposed to the constant struggle with logistics that is coding in script for me. Universe allows me to get my work done.

And more than that. The way in which a visual programming language lays out the logic, inspires me too be more creative. Looking at some dead text with odd characters is meaningless to me. But seeing the living graph light up while my programming is running gives me ideas.

Bientôt l’été has been entirely programmed visually. Until today.

I decided to have a closer look at the strange hiccups I was hearing in the wonderful music Walter Hus has composed for the game. And sure enough, my Universe graphs were the culprit. In Unity’s profiling tools I noticed regular spikes that were identified as something mysterious called Garbage Collection. When I turn off the graphs, the spiking stops. The average framerate of the game is fine, but the spikes in performance mess up the music.

When I transcribe the visual logic to scripts, the problem does not occur. So the fault is not with my programming. Once again, my creativity is being mangled by engineering flaws. I love computers, I adore what we can make them do. But they’re so sensitive, so weak. The slightest thing that happens out of the ordinary, throws them off. You have to be so terribly careful with them. Careful in a way that only obsessive engineers can be. How am I supposed to make art with this thing?

Part of what inspires me to make Bientôt l’été is my fondness of the seaside during grey weather. It’s a very common sight here in Belgium, yet one that is not popular. Our entire coast is a continuous sandy beach, 67 kilometers long. And whenever the sun dares to shine on a holiday or in the weekend, the highways are jammed with people from all over the country driving to the seaside. Maybe that’s why I like the seaside when the weather is bad: I don’t like crowds.

We were at the seaside today, for making motion captures of walking on the sand and in the wind. A completely overcast sky. Grey sand, grey water, grey clouds. Ideal in my mind and yet it didn’t draw me as it used to. Maybe I have ruined my taste for the real grey seaside by making an idealized version of it in a videogame. Or maybe I’m just sick of staring at it. I must admit that there’s also a shadow of a memory of our somewhat unsettling encounter with the sea in Trouville. Ever since, I’ve been somewhat afraid of the huge mass of water that just sits there making terrible growling noises all the time like a huge wet monster.

Technical issues also ruined the mood. Motion capture suits and computers don’t mix well with sand. And for no good reason someone started bulldozing at the foot of the dunes where we had left our stuff. So much for our peaceful little outing at the deserted seaside. But I’m extra motivated to make our own virtual seaside as lovely as possible. Because it may only exist in dreams.

I have implemented the first passes of the characters today. Auriea modeled them. They’re not finished yet but it’s good to replace the Woodsman Wolf and Misc Woman X with characters actually designed for the game.

Man and woman we created them. Or Homme and Femme as they are called in the game. They are losely inspired by the main characters in Moderato Cantibile (once played by Belmondo and Moreau in Brook’s 1960 film of the novel by Duras). In the sense that the woman is somewhat upperclass and refined and the man is working class and a bit rough. I also imagine the woman being slightly older than the man.

Their clothing was designed specifically to blow in the sea wind. Not in a gentle summery breeze kind of way, but more like the continuous almost violent tugging that happens at the Atlantic coast. We didn’t replicate any specific design, but Martin Margiela functioned as a reference for the woman’s look and Boris Bidjan Saberi for the man’s. So she’s stylish, but very modern, while he is a bit of a nomad.

Another peculiar thing about their design is that I don’t want their faces to be seen in the game. They have faces but the man wears a scarf and a hood and the woman has big sun glasses on. In the game, they will do their best to look in the same direction as the camera, showing you the back of their heads.

This is the first game we make in which the characters are actually intended to just be avatars. They have no autonomy. But they are not entirely neutral either. They have a personality. But no backstory. They are a man, and a woman.

I have made Twitter accounts for each character (@unHom and @uneFem). Not sure what I will do with those yet. Maybe I’ll find a way to connect them to the multiplayer part of the game.

We watched a 2 hour long film by Marguerite Duras yesterday -Sunday is the holy day for living room passivities around here. Now I finally know that its title, “Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert”, is the answer to the question “What is Vice-Consul of France shouting?”

The entire film consists of several people talking in a neutral voice -often in pairs, often in the form of questions and answers- over slow camera pans of an abandoned and empty baroque mansion. Only at the very end do we see two women, sitting, for a few moments.

The story, however, is populated with multiple remarkable characters, many of whom recur in several of Duras’ novels. It’s the story of the ball. The ball where a heart is broken such that it renders a person mad. The woman who breaks the heart is, as always, Anne-Marie Stretter, who was called Ana Maria Guardi when she lived in Venice.

The events take place in Asia, among French diplomatic circles. But the images we see, are of a Western building, abandoned. Probably somewhere in Europe, not Asia. The neo-classical style creates a connection between colonies and motherland. But it’s a vague one.

Despite the recipe of this film being one for utter bore-fest, I experienced it as a fascinating journey that I wanted to absorb every drop of. It’s strange how, once you have stepped towards the film and allowed it to capture you, you never want to leave. The few times that I nodded off -as one does in front of art films- I cursed myself for missing a few sentences. That’s how intensely desirable the text had become.

And the strangest thing happened with the images. Even though the scenery depicted nothing of the story, and even though it was set in a different place and the light was wrong, at some point, the images began to fuse with the story. And the rooms and grounds of the abandoned mansion started to refer to the events and places in the story. Even though no connection exists, and none is actively suggested, after seeing both simultaneously for an extended period of time, one became absorbed by the other, as I was absorbed by the film.

— Que faites vous? Venez.
— J’écoute India Song. Je suis venus aux Indes à cause d’India Song. Cet air me donne envie d’aimer. Je n’ai jamais aimé. Je n’avais encore jamais aimé.