I was looking at reproductions of Ingres’ drawings and noticed that he was doing something similar to my white room + details idea. In this drawing, for instance, as in many of his, the face is worked out with more refinement and detail than the rest of the body. It feels a little bit odd when you start noticing this pattern in his drawings.

To a contemporary viewer, the oddness gets worse. After a century of modernism, and an unprecedented familiarity with photographic images, many of us would be inclined to appreciate the drawing of the body more than that of the face. In the loose lines that represent the fabric of the clothing, we enjoy seeing the hand of the artist. But when our eye moves to the face, we lose interest. She just looks like a woman, not unlike many depictions on Flickr.

When we move to a full painting, it probably becomes very difficult for us to appreciate the craft of the artist. Certainly, we admire the image for its content and aesthetics. But it takes quite a bit of concentration and experience to fully realize that this image was produced by a hand of a man, painstakingly applying paint to a canvas. Craft is far easier to recognize, for us, in the drawing of the clothing.

Will players of Bientôt l’été appreciate the empty space of the beach more than sparse detailed objects in it? I wonder.

When I started working on Bientôt l’été, I was trying to find a style that was vague, blurry and perhaps a bit glitchy. At the same time, I did want the 3D simulation to feel real, and tangible. A big part of the effect I wanted to achieve could be done in post-processing the rendered image. But for an image to be processed, it needs to exist first. So I figured I should build a game world first and then mess it up visually.

I designed and blocked out the exterior area over several iterations. There’s the sea and the beach, a dyke with a row of houses, a pier and an industrial harbour on one side and a villa on a cliff on the other, and there’s dunes. A lot of elements were inspired by my Google-enabled virtual visits to Trouville-sur-Mer, the city on the coast of Normandy where Duras lived for some time, aspects of which one can encounter in several of her books and films.

As the game environment started feeling like a real place, I also started to realize how much model and texture work was going to be needed to achieve a near photographic illusion. And what for? To mess up the rendering of this reality in post-processing. I realized that I was taking the long way around and that this was stupid considering the small scale of this project.

And then it came to me: why should I show anything in the game that is not important, that is not pertinent or poignant? So I swiped it all of the table and started, almost literally, with a blank slate. I had developed a fondness for photographs of early urban development at the seaside around the turn of the previous century (like this and this). I like the emptiness in those scenes. Not much had been built yet, but what was there was wonderful Victorian seaside architecture.

I decided to start from an empty space, a white room. And only add detail to elements that were important. In fact, make those elements as beautiful and “realistic” as possible.

It’s very liberating to think of my game environment as empty. Instead of worrying about how to get all those models and textures made, and where to make the unavoidable sacrifices, I can now work in a purely additive fashion (and accompanying positive mood). If I need a tree, I’ll add a tree and make it beautiful. But I don’t start from the assumption that there will be trees. Maybe there will not be any.

This idea also connects well with the artificiality of the holodeck context as well as with the gravitation towards silence in Duras’ work. And it’s something that is always on our minds at Tale of Tales: the desire for an aesthetic style that emerges from the medium’s own strengths rather than its capacity to imitate.

One of the things I want to capture in Bientôt l’été is the sort of introverted, concentrated way in which almost nothing happens but a few words spoken, a small gesture made, the way in which Duras seeks for precision, accuracy, by standing still, and focusing. I wanted to find an interaction, a “mechanic” if you will, to express this, so you would feel this process when you play, do this activity of focusing, of freezing in your steps and concentrating. I felt I couldn’t use the “let go to interact” mechanic of The Path because, this time, the player needed to be in control. He or she needs to do this, engage with what they are looking at. But in a way that is almost passive, almost nothing.

So I came up with a simple idea: press a key to close your eyes: the screen becomes black, and the object you want to interact with fades in. You need to hold the key (=keep your eyes closed) long enough for the object to be completely “there”. When it is, the interaction happens (in most cases, collecting something from the beach, often a phrase).

This activity of closing your eyes is always available. You can also do it when no object is nearby. You can blink, if you like. As such it is our version of Grand Theft Auto’s greatest feature: honking the car horn. :) When you keep your eyes closed for a bit longer, your inventory of collected items fades in. We’re thinking of these items more as memories (as in The Path). Though there will also be real objects that you can carry with you and play with in the café.

This new game started by combining two older ideas. One is the desire to create something interactive with the atmosphere of certain passages in Marguerite Duras’ novels: when lovers sit next to each other and stare into the distance, silently, or speaking words that seem dry or unfeeling or irrelevant or even cruel, while the reader knows the passions raging inside. The other idea is for an ambient multiplayer game set in a virtual park: you sit down on a bench and another player sits down next to you, you don’t speak, you don’t interact, you just enjoy each other’s company.

Duras’ novel Moderato Cantabile provided us with the basic situation for Bientôt l’été: a man and a woman meet in a seaside café. We do not plan to tell the story of the novel. We will just borrow this situation and combine it with other elements from other novels and add to this ourselves. In the café, you will meet another player and communicate with him or her in the awkward-yet-precise style of Duras’ dialogs. Ultimately we want you to fall in love with your partner, an impossible love. You might need to build up to that. Maybe over several play sessions. The elements you can use in the conversation will be found on the beach, outside. This is the single-player part of the game: strolling along the beach, collecting thoughts and things that wash ashore.

This entire world is presented as a simulation. You are not actually in a seaside town on the French Atlantic coast. You are in a space station, god knows how far away from the nearest inhabited planet. The seaside only exists on some kind of holodeck. And the people you talk to are far away, probably also on a space station, somewhere in the universe. This may not always be apparent in the game. We’re not sure yet how much of this science fiction framework we will actually display. But the assumption is definitely there.

For us, the holodeck and the communication in space is a metaphor for the actual situation of the players: on their computers connected through the internet, a situation very familiar and dear to Auriea and I since this is how we met and fell in love.

Maybe you will too.

Ils cessent de rire. Regardent ailleurs. Dehors, à perte de vue, les rizières. Le vide du ciel. La chaleur blême. Le soleil voilé.

I have started this blog to post all sorts of things that come up during the production of our new game Bientôt l’été. I will try to post something every day. This will give insight into our development process and hopefully get you interested in the final result.

We are usually somewhat shy about sharing details of our games before they are done, simply because we create them in such a non-linear, sometimes chaotic fashion. For all our talk about using this medium to express something, the actual production process is far less under our control than we might want. We always change our minds about certain ideas even after we felt quite sure about them. And then after we have rejected them, sometimes we can’t help coming back to them. As a result, we really can’t tell what the game we are making will be like, until it is published.

So you will see all sorts of things on this blog that will never make it into the final product. Some of these might be things that you (and we) really like. So not seeing these in the final game may lead to disappointment. That’s a risk we’re taking with this experiment.

On the other hand, we hope that what we talk about here will arouse your excitement about our new project, and stimulate you to share your feelings with your friends. Because, even though Bientôt l’été is not intended for a mass audience, we would like for it to reach all the fine people who might have a taste for it.