Emi and Adrien, creators of Caravan SandWitch

September 12, 2024 sees the release of Caravan SandWitch, the first project from French studio Plane Toast. In the interests of accessibility, we offer you this written transcript of the interview conducted by Bénédicte and Inksushi with Emi and Adrien, who are behind this intriguing and exciting project.

Bénédicte : Tell us a little about how this adventure began.

Adrien : That’s good, because we’ve got our own little story to tell every time. In fact, Emi and I met in high school. In a small lycée in Provence.

That’s pretty much where we’re from. At least, where our parents decided to settle. We started our little duo when we realized that I liked coding. Emi also coded and was very interested in the artistic side of things. So we thought it would be perfect to do projects together. We started doing little jobs, little game jams.

We spent entire summers together just developing stuff. We weren’t necessarily the high schoolers who spent the most time out partying. But we were fine with that at the time.

Emi : Maybe we should have partied more haha.

At one point, we thought we had a really good idea. We decided to make a video game in one summer. At the end of high school, we thought it would be a good idea to get into it. We got the idea when we were hiking in the Verdon.

We saw the landscapes of Provence and thought it would be great to do something with them. Something simple, something we could do in two months. We came up with a little something where you drive around with a caravan in the heart of the great landscapes of Provence. It had to be simple. We were convinced that we could do it in two months and that everything would be fine. Eight years later. The game hasn’t been released yet. It all started from there.

Inksushi :  It was a big project that completely overwhelmed you?

Adrien : Let’s just say it evolved a lot. The first version was nothing like what we’re doing now. It went off in all directions. We gave ourselves a summer to make this game.

At the time, we were using the Unity engine. We had different inspirations. We’d diverged quite a bit from our original idea. We ended up making a top-down shooter with vehicles that had machine guns on the roof. It’s a far cry from what we’re proposing now.

I think we spent two or three years working on this project. We ended up starting our higher education. We’d just finished high school. Emi and I had the good idea of going to prep school and not having too much time to do other things. From that point on, it was very difficult to move forward with the project. We were a bit demotivated.

I think that, less and less, we found ourselves in the proposal we were making. That came later. First, I finished my studies and worked on a game called Pumpkin Jack.

I gained a bit of experience. When I finished that project, I got in touch with Emi and said, “Emi, we’ve got this great project that we’ve kind of put on the back burner. We don’t like it anymore. Maybe we need to take it back to the roots.”

Emi : I had to be convinced because I couldn’t stand the project any longer. But the timing was right, because by then I was fed up with my studies.

I left my school. We took a year off to make this prototype that had been on our minds. We decided to start from scratch.

We remade a prototype on Unreal. It took us three months to get it right. The first prototype served as a basis for proving to ourselves that we could do the thing.

Then we made a vertical slice in four months.

Adrien : That’s when we said to ourselves that the heart of the game, the essence we had to find, wasn’t so much guns on rooftops, but this chill ride through the desert in your van. We really tried to reorient the whole gaming experience around this idea.

Bénédicte : Can you explain the difference between a proto and a vertical slice for those listening to us? Because the people who listen to us don’t necessarily know.

Emi : Prototypes can sometimes be used to sign with a publisher. But for us, the trick was to prove to ourselves that we could do it. We wanted to check that the gameplay worked, if only a little. It was a sort of prototype, lasting no more than 20 or 30 minutes.

All we had to do was walk around and talk to an NPC. We could use our van and try our hand at a little puzzle, and that was it. Vertical slice is a little more advanced. It’s supposed to represent the final game.

A vertical slice is a short moment, but with accomplished graphics, with accomplished gameplay, with something that could represent the final game. It’s supposed to be much more polished than a simple prototype.

Adrien : Theoretically, it’s like imagining the game as a big cake. That’s why it’s called vertical slice. You’re going to cut your slice of the cake, and you’re going to tell yourself that this portion of the game, this well-defined hour of gameplay, is going to be this slice of the finished cake. Except that, in fact, you haven’t done the rest yet, and so you’re only doing the part of the cake that stands on its own, with nothing to hold it up on the sides.

Emi : You have to think ahead. The cake shouldn’t be a round cake, but a pound cake. You add a little topping and sugar on top. A lot of sugar, a lot of topping to make it look like everything’s going well.

Adrien : On the vertical slice, you use a lot of effects to make it look professional, to make it look more like a real game than a prototype.

Bénédicte : Is this what will be used for the demo, for example?

Adrien : If you’re talking about the demo, about what could have been tested and put on Steam not long ago, then not at all. Vertical Slice is three years old now. It’s prehistory in terms of the project.

It was a time when we were still refining the idea of the game. Some of the characters who were in the Vertical Slice survived and are still around. But it wasn’t the same graphic style, it wasn’t the same story, it wasn’t exactly the same gameplay.

The map is completely different. Today, it looks like the game in another dimension, if you compare it with what we had. It was a base that enabled us to do some Twitter com, to try and show that we were capable of attracting an audience, and thus find a publisher by saying “Look, there are people interested in our game, maybe you should publish us.” That was a bit of a gamble.

Emi : That was the plan, and it worked. The goal was really to get someone to understand that two 22-23 year olds could make a complete game.

Ink : To come back a little to the vertical slice and the demo, I think that your vertical slice means that you really put in all your gameplay kernels to show the experience you’d like players to have, whereas with the demo, you’re more into teasing. It’s a bit like getting your fingertips on the game to make people want to go further.

Emi : It was really approached in a completely different way. The demo that was on Steam a few weeks ago is representative of the final product. We only took a portion of it so that people could get a feel for the final gameplay and story, but without giving too much away.

Unlike the vertical slice, here there’s the whole cake to hold the slice. And on top of that, we put glitter at the beginning, middle and end, so that the slice of cake really makes you want to eat it all.

Adrien : So we were approached by Dear Villagers, a publisher based in Montpellier. We won’t go into the details of the contract, but on the whole, they gave us the means, or at least the funding, to put together a sizeable team and achieve our ambitions as well as theirs. Because they also had expectations of the project that were perhaps a little greater than those we had at the outset, but I think it worked. It pushed us to go a little further. As a result, our Plane Toast studio, which we had set up for the occasion, grew rapidly in size.

So it was a bit of an Indie Dream, as we say, that began. After that, you have to bear in mind that this dream also becomes a lot of management and work when you end up with 14 different people collaborating on the project. The intensity varies from moment to moment. All in all, it’s a development that’s taken about two and a half years, or a bit longer, and we’ve met some incredible people.

Everyone gave their all, and that made for a pretty cool game that we’re pretty proud of today. The demo clearly exceeded our expectations in terms of commercial success, in the sense that a lot of people talked about it. That’s why we’re talking to you about it today.

Ink : I think a good part of the Point & Think team threw themselves at the demo, and I’m thinking about the moment when you have that famous barrier fall, you’re hurtling through the desert and you have that famous fade to black that says “Thanks, that was fun. See you later.

Adrien : That’s great, because we worked with the art director about a week or two before the demo came out. We did what we call an IRL. Sometimes you get together with the whole team in person.

We’d say, “How do we finish the demo?” And then Charles says, “Go ahead. We’d get them out in the desert, put on the music, the camera would move away, and then it’d be pitch black and everyone would be so disappointed. We’re playing with their expectations”, so I quickly had it prototyped. And when we saw the playtesters, well, the people on Twitch who were too disgusted, we thought “Ah yes, we’ve done that. Mission accomplished.” 

Ink : You’re talking about your team of 14 people at the most. What role do you play in this team?

Emi : Yes, it’s true that we haven’t talked too much about it. It’s evolved a little. Of course, it’s complicated when you go from a game you started with two people to a game you’ve grown to 14 people. Responsibilities change quite a lot.

Right now, my title is creative director. But basically, with Adrien, we’re already in charge of running the company and managing the team.

So I do a lot of 3D, game design, level design and storytelling too. Basically, I mainly do 3D. But actually, now I do everything.

Adrien : Yes, she’s the team’s ultimate multi-hat. She’s there to fill in whenever we don’t have someone to do it.

So, I’m the technical director. Because when you make a video game, you quickly forget that it’s a computer program. And it’s extremely complex. My job is already to develop a large part of the codebase.

And then we had two other developers who came on board. I was in charge of managing this team. And behind that, I also manage communication with all the designers who are going to come and develop quests for the project, for example.

That’s why we’ve developed a whole system that lets them do the quests they want to do. It’s a lot of communication to define what they want and give them the tools they need. Otherwise, my specialty, my little kinks, is UI. All the in-game interfaces you’ll see were developed by me. It’s also gameplay and programming. For example, the 3Cs.

The 3Cs stand for Character, Controller, Camera. These are the characters you can play. It’s the van and Sauges. It’s about making sure it’s fun to control. Everyone will have their own opinion about driving the van. Sorry, we won’t be able to satisfy everyone.

Otherwise, my last trick is to work on what we call editor tools. These are tools where, in fact, we work in a large piece of software which is the game engine. And behind that, the people working on the game need sub-software, so to speak, to help them develop things that are very specific to our game. For example, quests. If we want to do quests in our game, it’s a lot easier if the designers can have an editor where they can write dialogues, have an editor where they can manage how the quests are arranged, how the events are going to coordinate, and so on.

So we need specific tools for that, and that’s my part too.

Ink : You were talking about driving the van. What’s complicated to code in driving the van? Because I think that for a lot of people, it looks pretty simple. But in games like this, with a bit of multi-gameplay, people are often a bit disappointed. What makes coding your van gameplay more complicated than coding a character gameplay, for example?

Emi: It’s terrible, because you’ll always have someone telling you that it’s spinning too fast, or that it’s all nonsense, or whatever. What do you know, really?

Adrien: Actually, the answer is quite simple, in the sense that a character, whether in first or third person, is a capsule that slides over the terrain.

The physics are very simple to do. However, it’s still very complicated to make a character that’s fun to control, because behind it you’ve got the whole animation overlay. Everything has to coordinate perfectly. But when you’re working on a vehicle, it’s a very complex task.

Emi : It’s also due to the fact that the representation of a character is standardized. People are very used to moving in a certain way, but vehicles are a mess.

Adrien : That’s it. In terms of game design, we know how a character should move, but in terms of vehicles, there’s such a wide range that finding the right vehicle for your game is difficult, and it’s even harder to meet everyone’s expectations.

First of all, in terms of code, a vehicle is extremely complex, because you have to create a kind of physical simulation. You have four wheels with suspensions. The suspensions move more or less. You’ve got engine power management, speed control, and so on.

In fact, who cares about all these parameters, about the physical reality of the vehicle? What counts is that the final feeling is interesting. You have to achieve this to get something that feels coherent when you play it, and above all not frustrating. Because, for example, some people will tell me that the van brakes too quickly, so maybe we need to improve it a bit, but if we let the van keep on going for ten meters every time we wanted to stop, people would be very frustrated, much more so than today.

Emi : I think the thing that required the most thought was the edge cases like these, which are hellish things to deal with. The vehicle that, suddenly, when it’s driving over some weird rocks, will go right through them. Given that it’s a simulation, which is even more advanced than a character, it’s very, very complicated to debug and get the game feel right.

For an infinite number of reasons, I could argue that a vehicle is complicated, but what happens if the vehicle flips over? What happens if the vehicle runs into a wall that slopes enough for it to roll backwards? Finally, there are about fifteen questions.

Ink : I think that especially in your game, since you have a big exploration core, you don’t have that side where you restrict the player to driving on a road and you have to anticipate everything that’s unanticipatable due to rough terrain and so on.

Adrien : Yes, you can drive absolutely anywhere. In fact, I think I spent a lot of time making sure the van didn’t get stuck. But if you get stuck playing our game, it’s usually because you’ve had it coming. It’s because you’ve put yourself between two rather odd rocks. There’s never a moment when you get stuck without realizing it. That’s the kind of classic thing that used to happen to us for a long, long time. Today, we’re on to something quite controllable.

Emi : There’s one thing people don’t realize, and that’s the extent to which gameplay is linked to the environment.

You have to develop the van and all the physics, all the simulation. Basically, you also have to make it fun to control in the game world.

You don’t realize how much effort goes into informing the player that they can drive a van to one place and not another. The aim is to make sure that you don’t end up taking slopes any old way and getting frustrated. Ultimately, the van is a dependent system, which includes some of the level art and level design that’s done externally.

In other words, you won’t see 50-degree slopes in the game. We’ve banned that. For all the level design, we’ve taken great care to make sure that there aren’t any slopes that you feel you can climb, but that in the end you won’t be able to.

There are lots of aspects like that that make the van more than just something you move around in.

Bénédicte : So, you were talking about the universe. Well, if we can go back to the game’s universe, it seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic setting. But there’s a certain optimistic, benevolent side to the images and the demo. How did you come to choose this universe, this setting, this context?

Adrien : There are so many games, so many universes that exist, that are just a little difficult, a little violent, very dystopian, that we think we also have a role to play, when we make a production like this, which is potentially going to be played by quite a few people. We’re influencing the subconscious fantasy that’s in people’s heads. And so, it’s important to give an image that we feel is positive, to counterbalance a little and show that the world can be a nice place, that people don’t all want to kill each other. We really wanted to have benevolent characters. Even though there are antagonists in Caravan SandWitch, we don’t necessarily see them. There’s what we call the Consortium, which is this kind of clichéd mega-corporation that controls all of space and has a lot of money.

In the end, the people here on this planet are trying to do the best they can, to help each other. And it’s these values that we wanted to convey, because more violent and gory values aren’t hard to find. We really wanted to offer cultural diversity.

Emi : We also wanted to do something where we could see people helping each other. I think the main reason why we did this was in opposition to cyberpunk, which has been very present in video games in recent years. Even today, as can be seen in many of the trailers we’re seeing at the moment, there are a lot of sci-fi shooters. The idea is to propose other myths to imagine more optimistic futures for humanity.

Even if, in the end, the objectives and values conveyed through this universe are somewhat similar to the cyberpunk worlds we see, i.e. that capitalism is bad. It’s something that’s shown throughout the game, that globally, capitalists have attacked all nature, all humans, and exploited everything until they can no longer exploit anything. The idea here is to show, basically, that there are proposals for a better future.

It’s something we’ve also learned a lot about from our involvement with alternative circles and ZADs, in fact, which show us that a lot can be achieved just by creating communities and helping each other. The aim is to raise awareness of this post-apocalyptic side. But to go beyond just “gee, capitalism is leading us to our doom”. The aim is to show that we can create other things alongside or after capitalism.

In fact, it’s part of what’s there: a small village, people helping each other, not forgetting all the problems that go with it. In other words, the small village is still dependent on a number of large space cities. So we’re trying to put a little bit of all that together.

Bénédicte : There’s a lot of talk about solarpunk, hop-punk and so on. I believe that in your case, there’s a term that has emerged, particularly on social networks, and that’s provence-punk.

Emi : I don’t know what to make of it haha.

Adrien : You have to be careful with the term provence-punk, because there are some interesting things in Provence too.

Emi : Yeah, actually, I have a funny relationship with that term. I mean, yes, I think it’s pretty funny. But as someone who spent all her teenage years in Provence, I have to say that I’m not particularly fond of Provence after all. Turn of events haha, not everyone is.

In fact, for me, Provence is also a kind of idealized version of life. I mean, let’s face it, when people want to buy a house in Provence, they’re going to imagine things with red-tiled roofs, a little garden, a cicada and so on. They imagine this kind of ideal Mediterranean life.

Adrien : It’s a kind of cultural appropriation of the real Provençals.

Emi : Yes, maybe not to that extent. Let’s just say that we’ve created an image of Provence that isn’t really what it is. In fact, this way of life is destructive, because it’s essentially a bourgeois way of life.

The other thing is that Provence exists only because it’s the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of exploiting nature. Basically, the Provence that exists today wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t cut down all the oak trees, for example.

Today, when you go for a walk in Provence, you’re in scrubland, with small prickly trees.

Inksushi : Basically, I think everyone has spent a few vacations in the South of France, and we all have this image of big pine forests, big conifers, things like that. Of that slightly deserted side, as you represent it in the game. This landscape wouldn’t be the way it is if it hadn’t been for human intervention over the last few centuries.

Emi : Absolutely, and even in Roman times and all that.

Right from the start, trees were cut down, and these trees take years to grow back. Even the pine forests are there because they’re resistant to fire, which is often caused by humans. Basically, we were dealing with huge oak forests. I may be exaggerating the size of the thing, but it was completely different.

Adrien : Rainfall is very much affected by what we do to nature.

Emi : You have to imagine that Provence is fundamentally artificial. In our game, we’re on a planet that’s completely artificial. In other words, it’s a desert, and at the same time, natural things are brought in. There are goats, but why would there be goats on a planet like that?

After a while, you realize that nature as it was on the planet in the beginning doesn’t resemble our Provencal nature at all. And that part of the original nature has been devastated. And that before, on that planet, there were a lot of tides and wetlands. I won’t spoil the rest.

But the same is true of Provence. It’s also the case in Montpellier, for example. In Montpellier, there were a lot of tides and we concreted over as much as possible. Our idea is to talk about that. That’s why we call ourselves Provence Punk. A little, because it’s fun, because it gets people talking about the game. But, at the same time, I find the term very ambiguous.

Inksushi : It could be said that this term doesn’t suit the image you’d like to project of Provence.

Adrien : Personally, I don’t mind Provence Punk. I really like Provence. I was born in Provence, unlike Emi. I have a special affection for this region, even if I also see all the problems that come with it.

But I’m happy that we’re inspired by Provence and that we’re representing it in our game, because if we’ve decided to represent Provence, it’s not trivial, because it’s not the most common place in video games to see Provence.

I think A Plague Tale 2 does it really well, with Mediterranean landscapes. But in the end, when we started making Caravan SandWitch, basically, before we said Provence, we said we were going to make a game in the desert.

And we ended up doing red rocks, red sand, cacti, something very Utah, very American, because that’s kind of the classic cultural representation we have of a desert. And then we said to ourselves, “Why are we going so far afield, when we live in a magnificent place, which is our own environment, and which we’re much better placed to represent in the end, than to go and represent something based on a cultural idea we think we know.

One day, I went rock-climbing and said to Emi, “Why aren’t the rocks white in Caravan SandWitch? And that’s when we started working on limestone. In fact, right away, everything speaks to us more, everything makes a lot more sense, because we know the geological history of the place.

We know limestone, we know its rocks, we know thyme, rosemary, all the things of Provence. And as a result, representing them, even for artists, was much more fluid. We knew how things should be, even if we had to look for references. We knew where we should place this bush, we knew where we could put pine trees in this place in the level design, because it made sense, it echoed our experience. As a result, we’re telling a story that’s much closer to us. And I think that’s what’s so interesting about this authenticity. And then, of course, commercially, Provence is something that sells well. People love Provence, it’s a worldwide image.

Emi : It’s not something we said to ourselves when we started creating the game. We realize it today, but in the end, when we took the step of putting in something more Provençal, it was mainly to talk about things we know, because we’d moved away from all that. We did something that was a bit of a mix of other games we liked. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it was a lot less personal. In the end, we made the right choice to make a game that was more personal, that motivated us more, that talked about things we knew. So we didn’t need to look for legitimacy or ask ourselves too many questions. In the end, we just did the things we knew. We have a small village, we have houses with red tiles. People aren’t racist and they don’t vote 90% RN, but these are things you find in the villages of Provence, but not necessarily in video games.

Bénédicte : So, apart from your surroundings, were there any other influences or sources of inspiration in Caravan SandWitch?

Inksushi : For example, those humanoid frog characters. I don’t think there are any 1.80-meter frogs in the middle of Montpellier.

Bénédicte : Or maybe just in the graphic choices and so on.

Emi : There’s a lot to be said for graphic choices. As for the frogs, you should know that they were almost fish-men swimming in the sand. But that was a long time ago. It evolved into frogs, because frogs are cool.

Adrien : I think the frog thing was really something at the outset, even if they weren’t in the vertical slice. Emi had said for a long time that she’d really like there to be a frog community. She sometimes has ideas like that running through her head. So we thought we’d give it a go, because we thought it would be interesting.

It worked out quite well, because it allowed us to tell the whole story of the planet’s past. Once again, these are things that will be discovered in the game. But the whole history of this planet, before mankind arrived, is marked by these frogmen who lived their cushy lives, who had a great civilization. What state are they in today? What impact has all this had on their lives?

Emi : Capitalism destroys lives, that’s the final message.

There’s one element of Provence that’s important to frogs, and that’s the midwife toads. You need to go on the internet and search for the sound of the toads. I’m not going to do it live again, because that would be very embarrassing.

Adrien : If you live in Provence, you’ve already heard it without knowing that’s what it was.

Emi : I’m sure you have, because you don’t realize that they’re toads. It’s pretty cool, it’s a pretty important Provencal element. What’s interesting is that I think it’s the males that carry the eggs on their backs. That’s why they’re called midwife toads. This element of Provence is interesting. I won’t go into the sociology of frogs, because I don’t know anything about it.

Bénédicte : So, in your choice of graphics, you said there was a lot to say.

Emi : Oh yes! Charles could talk about graphic inspiration much better than I can.

The best-known thing, I’d say, is Firewatch, in terms of graphics. That game was a source of inspiration right from the start. After that, Charles had his own graphic universe. He developed it through Road 96.

Charles Boury, artistic director of Road 96. That’s where he started from, drawing a lot of his inspiration from Studios Ghibli films and other games like Sable, which was inspired by Moebius.

Adrien : The game has been compared a lot to Jusant, even if it wasn’t particularly inspirational, it’s just that it happened at the same time as us.

But on Caravan SandWitch, we also tried something a bit new in terms of graphic composition, and I think that was noticed. We’re told it’s quite fresh visually. We tried some innovative visual rendering techniques. We think that stylization is something that stands the test of time better, that’s more personal, and you can tell a much more interesting story with it.

And then, of course, there are a huge number of visual inspirations. It’s hard for us to go into all that, because it’s not our field, and Charles would have to be there.

Emi : Afterwards, in the colors and everything, it’s something that’s completely inspired by Provence. It was something that was already in the vertical slice, but Provence, Cézanne’s paintings and things like that are still very classic.

We went hiking in Provence as a team, during pre-production, to get a feel for the place. And it’s worth noting that even Charles left Paris to go further south during this production, which may have nothing to do with it. But all the same, it’s very much inspired by reality, and at the same time, adapted to Charles’ stylized, graphic universe.

I couldn’t give an example of a work or something that inspired us more than another, because graphic development started before Charles, with me. And with influences very different from his own. I delegated everything to Charles in terms of art direction afterwards.

But he was already starting out with a base, and graphic techniques that we had developed, to which he was able to adapt. The graphic development of this game, of this project, is partly due to the production constraints we had. So basically, I can’t give you an answer of more than five lines.

Bénédicte : No, there’s no problem. On the contrary, it’s super interesting. It’s really interesting to listen to, and to have all this emulation of influence.

Emi : I can tell you about it. For example, vegetation is something that has changed very little, in terms of style, since the beginning. For example, the bushes and trees are something I did for the vertical slice. I don’t think the trunks of the trees have changed at all. The leaves were redone. Then there were a lot of techniques deployed around the trees.

It’s something Charles was able to adapt to. Then there was the influence of Shanice, who worked on the level art and 3D props. Basically, it’s the influence of all these people that really makes the final rendering.

Adrien : I think what we really wanted to convey visually was the southern feel, the sun, Provence, summer vacations. We were really inspired by this, with its shimmering colors and farting blue sky. Our ambition was to create a very colorful universe.

Emi : I’m going to get a slap on the wrist if I don’t explain the artistic direction properly. There’s one important thing too. We were inspired by the Ghibli films, not only in their graphic style, but also in their political and social dimension. Miyazaki’s films are very much about fascism and war. That’s something we mustn’t forget. The idea is that we drew a lot of our inspiration from that, particularly for everything to do with structures, machines and scrap metal, everything to do with the exploitation of corporations.

Indeed, the idea is that we asked ourselves a lot of questions about the representation of technology in the game and the opposition between technology and nature. This was one of the guidelines of our artistic direction. We drew a lot of our inspiration from what we’d seen in our little villages, but also from things we’d seen in our ZADs. When it came to technology, we drew a lot of inspiration from the machines in the Ghibli films. You know, big mechanical things flying around, things like that. We didn’t necessarily use the same visual codes. In other words, it’s very round in Ghibli. With us, it’s more square.

Bénédicte : We also get the impression, and it’s more than just an impression, from playing the demo or watching the videos, texts, etc., particularly on the Steam page and others, that there’s a real focus on the game’s ecological orientation. Did you want to talk about these issues?

Inksushi : There’s also this huge tornado in the background which, from what we saw in the demo, inevitably echoes a very ecological approach to the environment and the impact that the changes brought about by the corporation can have on the ecosystem.

Emi : Honestly, there’s something interesting to be said about this tornado. But, to put it bluntly, I think we’re a little disappointed because we didn’t manage to make a more relevant and precise statement about ecology. Production problems, on the whole, meant that it was a bit complicated to carry everything at once and to manage to come up with a clear message.

As early as Day 0, when we had this sort of vision of this hill, we said to ourselves that it would be really good to make a game where you drive around in a caravan in a Provencal desert. That was our intention. When you’re creating, you always carry something with you. I was 17-18 when we came up with the idea for the game, and I think our project still has that in it.

I wanted at all costs to be able to expel from myself all my eco-anxiety, all my rage against this world that is destroying itself. This society that is knowingly ignoring what was obvious to me at the time. We already knew that we were heading straight for the wall in ecological terms, with global warming and the destruction of our ecosystems. We’re perhaps going to talk more about this aspect in Caravan SandWitch than about global warming, because in fact, given that it’s science fiction and doesn’t really take place in our universe, it’s not necessarily obvious to talk exactly about the problem of CO2 emissions.

But what’s important to remember in this universe, too, is that there are climate change issues. In other words, the planet has been completely changed by human exploitation. It’s a bit like terraforming in sci-fi terms. I find it a very strange principle. I’ve seen it in some games that show this concept as something very positive. For example, we recently had the game Terra Nil. The idea is to impose an artificial nature on a territory that doesn’t belong to you.

I find the idea of humans arriving on a planet and terraforming it to meet their own needs quite dramatic. And when I say it’s done the opposite of terraforming, it’s because, in the story of Caravan SandWitch, exploitation has just made the planet habitable by humans, but not enough to make it livable. Basically, we can breathe, everything’s fine, but in fact, the whole planet is now desert after digging into it like Swiss cheese and exploiting everything that could be found there.

I think we’re talking about ecology here. I hope we’ve managed to take enough precautions to try and avoid falling into some of the shortcomings of science fiction, which often takes a rather colonialist approach.

After that, as for the big storm, yes, it was supposed to be something very different as the production progressed.

Adrien : It’s something that’s been there since the first idea for the project with the SandWitch. Hence the SandWitch in the title. It’s not sandwiches we’re going to sell with our food truck. We should have explained that at the outset. Maybe we should have introduced the game at the start of the discussion, but we’ll assume that the people reading this interview have already played the demo.

The storm, at first, had a very mystical aspect to it. Eventually, it took a much more concrete turn. The storm, without going into too much detail, is the result of what we call an accident.

It’s something that happened some time ago on this planet. A machine at the center of this storm went haywire. There’s a very Chernobyl feel to it.

More locally, we have a project that the people of Provence will be familiar with, called ITER, which is an international collaboration to produce nuclear fusion, a virtually limited form of energy.

Maybe ITER is very safe, I don’t know, but if something like that were to go completely off the rails, as we saw with Chernobyl, we’d end up with a kind of anomaly on the planet, a place where you really shouldn’t go, where humans are no longer welcome.

That’s what this place is all about. There’s this storm, and people learn to live with it. They don’t get too close. It has a huge impact on life, on the way we have to organize ourselves, on the fact that working for the megacorporations that used to be there isn’t so easy now that it’s right in the middle of it….

Emi : Once again, it’s the result of having spent our entire adolescence next to a kind of gigantic industrial mega-complex with lots of people working on it. My parents worked on ITER. Basically, it’s something that I think had an impact on me and on us. Honestly, I’ve never been afraid of ITER exploding and engulfing us. But now we’re imagining it. What’s less interesting, I think, is imagining the explosion. And what’s more interesting, I think, is how we thought the story up.

In the final game, you realize just how much everything revolves around this machine. In other words, you’re going to discover a lot of ruins. Ruins of factories, transformers, heliports, spaceports, things like that. These ruins are all designed to work with this enormous machine. Here again, there’s a parallel with violence.

For example, I come from a small village whose population has increased significantly as a result of this project. Because, in fact, the ITER zone is lost in the middle of nowhere. But people come because they find work nearby.

So there’s a kind of strangeness about this village. A lot of people are catapulted here, which means they have to cohabit with little old people who have been here for generations and have hardly ever left.

Adrien : Villages have sprung up all over Provence and the surrounding area to accommodate the people who come here. In particular, a whole infrastructure was developed. In other words, roads have been built between the ports and ITER so that 40-meter-long convoys can pass through.

In fact, a lot of things are organized around it. And in Sigalous, around this machine, the whole town has been designed with this in mind. So we’ve gone back to that side of things. This sort of infrastructure-village that is created around this big machine, where everyone lives for it. It’s something that spoke to us.

Emi : In the end, it had a big influence on the game’s design.

Adrien: There aren’t many games that talk about ITER.

We talk about it a little. In fact, I think there’s even a little easter egg. If you look in the distance, in one direction, on the horizon, there’s the silhouette of ITER.

Emi: Which isn’t particularly interesting visually, because it’s really a big square. It’s a big square with cranes. But it helps to maintain the feeling of drinking your beer and zoning out in a disgusting Provençal industrial zone.

Bénédicte: So, one of the subjects we haven’t touched on yet, and that’s still in the creation of the game, of course, is the soundtrack. I read that you collaborated with Antynomy on the soundtrack. Why this choice? How did you come into contact with them? How did the production of the soundtrack go?

Adrien: That’s a very good question. Well, Antynomy is a Frenchwoman living in Belgium, who had never worked on video games before. We were put in touch by someone who was lead narrative designer on the project.

It all happened through an exchange of e-mails. I think it was Antynomy who was looking for work, contacting people. So we thought, why not?

We saw a bit of her portfolio, what she was doing. It was hard at first to get our heads around it, because she hadn’t done any video game composition, even though she’d worked on quite a few documentaries. We got in touch very quickly and things went really well.

In fact, it was a bit of a gamble, because we asked someone who didn’t necessarily have this experience to produce music for such a specific medium. Video games are pretty special. We have a lot of music that loops around. In other words, instead of having, for example, music for zone A and music for zone B, we’ll instead have layers of different music, with layers of instruments that will be added or removed, depending on what’s happening in the story, and where we find ourselves.

It’s a different way of making music, but Antynomy was up to the challenge. She had this side that particularly interested us. It was her voice. She sings very well, and she sings in French. We wanted to play on that a little bit, in the same way that we talk about Provence, which is a territory we know, why go and sing in English when we can speak in words that are closer and more familiar to us?

What’s more, it gives us the French touch when we go abroad. But it was very important to us. We also had a lot of inspiration. Personally, I listen to a lot of music. I’d say summer pop, modern, French, like Clara Micheli, Junior, that kind of incredible artist. That’s how the game’s title track, Pensée dérobée, came about. It’s been on all the trailers so far, and it’s done incredibly well.

We’ve had a lot of people asking us who the artist is and where to find the title. It’s been a lot of work with lots of people doing mastering and so on. There are other songs, other sung tracks, all the same. But this is the main song, with very beautiful lyrics that actually tell a bit of the story of the game.

So you have to know it to make the connection with the lyrics. But yeah, it was very important for us to have something like that. In fact, we did everything in this game. We never considered buying a track anywhere. We wanted the music to represent the game perfectly, to be in perfect symbiosis with the visuals and the story we were telling. Antynomy was very good at this.

Inksushi : It’s a successful collaboration because, clearly, as you say, the music in the trailer plunges us straight into the mood you want to send back with your game. And even the pleasure of exploring this semi-desert area with ruins, etc., under this very quiet soundtrack, makes the experience ultra enjoyable. And it works really well.

Adrien : We don’t often get the chance to express ourselves directly like this with the media. So we talk a lot about our hidden agendas, our political visions. It’s not what you see most in the game, because in reality, it’s a very chill game. It’s a game of exploration, as you say. And most of the time, what we created was this atmosphere of being in the desert, having your time, having the cicadas around.

That was a pretty monumental part of the job. I think what we offer to people’s Steam libraries is this experience of rest and relaxation. There’s no action in Caravan SandWitch. There is in the scenario, but you’re not going to die, you’re not going to fight.

We wanted to show that it’s possible to make an interesting game without the need for violence. The soundtrack and visuals clearly contribute to this. It was really our gameplay pillar, what we wanted to tell. And it’s a successful mission, I think, because already in the demo, it worked.

Inksushi : I think you’ve succeeded in making the fight a little more macro, or in the sense that it’s not our hero against enemies, but more a quest against a much bigger, almost impalpable enemy, who are this corporation, this apocalyptic side, and that it’s a little the struggle of this little village, of survival in this environment that’s totally unsuitable.

Adrien : You’ve got it. Anyway, to come back to the subject of ecology, I think people are going to see a lot of things in the game. They’re going to see and interpret a lot of things in what we’re proposing. Even if we haven’t made things extremely clear, the intentions are going to be visible.

And as you say, if people feel that struggle, that’s great. Not everything is explained clearly, but they’ll still feel that the water is polluted, that bad things have happened. I don’t think we’re expecting that yet, but the community is going to take a lot of ownership of the work we’ve done.

Emi : The community has already started to appropriate the work. They’ve appropriated a small part of the map. But it’s clear that no one is going to make the connection with ITER.

Bénédicte: Now, everyone who heard this interview will make the connection.

Emi : People who lived in small villages nearby will feel represented. What I wanted to say is that, in any case, on the composition, the music and the sound, I’d like to point out that none of this would be possible without the help of Clotilde Schultz. Music is very cool in a game, but, in fact, without sound design the result wouldn’t be as impressive.

Adrien : She brought the world to life in a spectacular way. C’est ça. People feel they’re in Provence when they close their eyes.

Emi : The cicadas are the surface, but there’s the wind, there’s the sound of running water. In fact, I have to say the sound of running water. Because some designers make sounds and they don’t make noise. I say this because it’s an important distinction. It really gave the game incredible depth. Really, the sounds of nature, but also the sound of machines.

We could also talk about that, but the sound of solitude when you’re in the middle of a ruin, you’re alone and you’re exploring. It’s completely different. The same goes for the creaking of metal and concrete as they settle in. Sand in the desert or sand on concrete.

Adrien : Play with headphones when you play Caravan SandWitch. A lot of work has gone into the sound universe. I think people notice that.

Generally speaking, if you have a good sound design, you don’t notice it, but if you have a bad sound design, you notice it immediately.

Inksushi : I’ve been thinking about this coherence between the graphic ambience and the sound ambience, and so on. Before the interview, I was watching The Great Review’s video on your demo. And the most telling thing is the spots, the viewpoints, where he really stops and takes advantage of the atmosphere. And unlike other games where you have them and you stop on them and think “Oh no, shit, that was a pointless interaction, I’ll move on.” When you really need to settle down and enjoy what’s on offer, that’s when the job’s done.

Adrien : There’s something we wanted to say about the way we want people to play Caravan SandWitch. You have to play at your own pace. The gameplay revolves around that. There’s the fact, for example, that you can theoretically leave the game at any time and come back, without having to worry about how your saves are managed. We really wanted people to be able to put the controller down and come back later.

These moments of contemplation are really those moments when we invite people to put down the controller, maybe take a little break, reflect a little on what’s just happened and enjoy. In real life, I didn’t know how it was going to work. In the end, when we saw the game streamed, we realized that people were really into that.

After that, we drew a lot of inspiration from Stray’s move, because there’s this aspect where the camera slowly pulls back to find a cool artistic composition. It’s a bit of a pleasure to wait for the final image that will give the best screen capture.

We’ve had lots of people send us screenshots when they’ve stayed at a point of contemplation long enough to capture that perfect moment. Maybe it’s going a little too slowly, but overall, it’s cool to see that the overall atmosphere of the gameplay is really understood by the people who play it.

Emi: It gives the streamers something to talk about. What’s interesting is that while people are having this little moment of contemplation, the streamers have time to read the chat and respond.

Bénédicte : Do you have a message to pass on?

Emi : There’s something we’re seeing a lot of right now. With the current political situation and the state of the Steam forums, it’s good to remember that if you play Caravan SandWitch, there’s a certain amount of non-binary, queer, trans people and a very diverse cast of 25 characters that are represented in this game. So, there you have it, you’re prepared.

Please stop sending us refractory messages, like about inclusive writing and the like. We won’t read them, they’ll go straight into the garbage can. That’s something I’d like to say.

And that, please, if you make games, make them more inclusive. Include all types of characters. For me, all it takes is one trans character for me to play your game. It’s easy, it’s easy money anyway. But also, please, treat your subjects well, hire LGBT people and people with diverse backgrounds. Treat your employees well. As for the employees? Organize, join unions.

Adrien : I can see Béné agreeing wholeheartedly.

Bénédicte : Yes, yes, yes!

Emi : If there are people listening to this show who weren’t yet convinced. In any case, I hope they are now. Don’t hesitate. In any case, if anyone needs people to make their video game, we’ve worked with some great people who have been part of our team, some of whom are looking for work. Feel free to send us a message to find out more about the team, and even go to planetoast.com to see the full team and play Caravan SandWitch if you like. Big kisses to you all.

Bénédicte : Well, I think we’ll say goodbye on that lovely closing message. Thank you for being here tonight, today, during the day, depending on when you listen to this podcast. Thanks to Adrien and Emi for answering all our questions.