{"id":1147,"date":"2012-05-23T23:29:34","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T21:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2012-05-23T23:40:58","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T21:40:58","slug":"pre-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/pre-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Pre-history."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If all goes well, <em>Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em> will be released 3 years after our previous desktop game (<a href=\"http:\/\/Tale-of-Tales.com\/Fatale\">Fatale<\/a>) was released. Production of <em>Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em> should only take 9 months, though. Before we started on <em>Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>, we made an <a href=\"http:\/\/Tale-of-Tales.com\/Vanitas\">iPhone game<\/a>, we created <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/30073700\">prototypes<\/a> for two new games and worked on a collaborative project with <a href=\"http:\/\/alexmayhew.com\">Alex Mayhew<\/a> (of <em>Ceremony of Innocence<\/em> fame).<\/p>\n<p>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 <em>Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The sci-fi layer comes straight from <a href=\"http:\/\/cncntrc.tumblr.com\">Cncntrc<\/a>. The chessboard on the caf\u00e9 table with objects that you can move around comes from the <a href=\"http:\/\/xoba.tumblr.com\">experiments<\/a> we did on iPad with Alex. And the graphical user interface, including the textual hints, is similar to what we have developed for <a href=\"http:\/\/thebookof8.tumblr.com\">The Book of 8<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;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&#8217;s endless. You can make many prototypes and never know if they&#8217;re any good. And there&#8217;s always something that can be improved, so there&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>But we did learn a lot in that period. Next to the concrete ideas mentioned above, that knowledge is also being poured into <em>Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>. Even the dislike of prototyping has had a rather positive effect on <em>Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>&#8216;s production. It pushed us towards figuring out a concrete buildable design. This lead to a reductionist aesthetic that I&#8217;m quite happy with. And also to a design approach that eschews theoretical &#8220;on paper&#8221; design in favor of creating systems in the game engine based on how they feel. It&#8217;s the closest we&#8217;ve ever worked to our ideal situation of &#8220;the game is always finished, all we do is refine it&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If all goes well, Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9 will be released 3 years after our previous desktop game (Fatale) was released. Production of Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9 should only take 9 months, though. Before we started on Bient\u00f4t l&#8217;\u00e9t\u00e9, we made an iPhone game, we created prototypes for two new games and worked on a collaborative project with Alex [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1183,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tale-of-tales.com\/bientotlete\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}