About a year ago, I wrote a piece explaining how much we estimated making Dawnmaker would cost. Well, Dawnmaker is finished, so as promised, I'm going to revisit that and show you how much it actually cost to produce our game! Yay, more money talk!

We are 5 days away from the release of Dawnmaker! It is a time of excitement, of stress of course, but also of regrets as we realize that there are so, so many things that we will not be able to add to our game. Let's introduce today's topic with a short video that is very à propos:

Let's face it: Dawnmaker still has some important flaws. We're aware of that, and we are working on those flaws. One of the biggest remaining problem with the game was that one of its core mechanics, the oppression of the Smog, was… well, not explained at all. If you didn't have a developer behind your back to tell you, there was almost no way you could understand it.

L'année 2023 est terminée, donc comme depuis trois ans, c'est l'heure de dresser un bilan de ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois. Je démarre cette retrospective avec la sensation de n'avoir « rien » fait, mais c'est parce que je me suis concentré essentiellement sur un seul et unique projet, notre jeu Dawnmaker. Vous allez le voir, l'année a en fait été bien chargée pour moi. En route pour le bilan !

If you've played Dawnmaker in the last 6 months, you will have noticed, hopefully, that the board was rendered in 3D. After having received a lot of questions and criticism about that feature, we've decided a few months ago to redo the whole board rendering in 2D. After two months of work, I am proud to announce that Dawnmaker will soon have a new version containing only two dimensions! Today we're going to dig deeper into the why and how of this transition.

While we were preparing for this year's Game Camp in Lille, we had to work on our pitch for publishers. Part of that was refreshing our budget and making it as accurate as we could, so that 1. we know exactly how much money we need to ask for in order to comfortably finish our game and 2. publishers can see how much the game would cost and compare that to their revenue estimates.

Since we released Phytomancer in October 2021, my associate Alexis and I have been working on our next steps: building our second game, and building the company that will make it. Today, I want to share the process we went through to create that company, and explain why we went through each of those steps. I will not discuss administrative tasks, as that is quite specific to France. Instead, I want to focus on what makes our company unique: who we are, what we do, where we're going.

Oh, and, there's a little announcement at the end of this post… ;)

J'ai du mal à y croire, mais l'année 2021 se termine déjà. Voici donc le moment de faire le point sur cette période qui marque concrètement un tournant dans ma carrière : je suis désormais officiellement créateur de jeux vidéo. Pour preuve : des gens ont dépensé de l'argent pour jouer à un jeu que j'ai créé !

Au moment de faire le bilan de cette année, je me rends compte que ce premier jeu, et sa suite, m'ont pris toute mon énergie et tout mon temps. Si l'année dernière j'ai pu être créatif, prototyper des jeux, apprendre énormément sur la conception de jeux, en 2021 je me suis au contraire focalisé sur des choses beaucoup plus terre-à-terre. Voyons donc ensemble ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois…

About 6 months ago, I posted a call on this blog to find folks who would be interested in building a game in a non-hierarchical organization [fr]. This led to the assembly of a team of 7 people, and to the creation of the game Phytomancer, soon to be released. This is a post-mortem of our production period, looking back on all the mistakes we made and rejoicing about the few things we did correctly!

Bonne nouvelle : la création de mon studio de jeux vidéo en coopérative va bon train ! Après de multiples péripéties que je raconterais peut-être ici, j'ai constitué un tout petit groupe de trois personnes : James, Mathieu et moi-même. Nous avons commencé par nous échauffer en créant un petit jeu sur deux jours — Q, l'As du volant — et nous passons maintenant à l'étape supérieure. Nous allons créer un jeu, commercialisation comprise, en trois mois.