Game’n Breakfast : Marie Marquet

A warm welcome! Take a seat at our table and help yourself to a coffee or whatever you like. This morning sees the arrival of the new Game’n Breakfast. On this Sunday, I have a special guest in the person of Marie Marquet, co-founder of the Montpellier studio SplashTeam. She worked on Tinykin and has much more to share with us. This exchange goes back a few months, but Marie’s story hasn’t changed since then, and neither has her way of seeing things. So we’re off to discover a strong woman who always gives her all to get what she wants, and who puts human values at the heart of many things. I hope you enjoy your reading and I’ll see you at the end. Enjoy your coffee!

The birth of a vocation

Marie, like many of the people we meet in this section, does not have a classic career path, if there is such a thing. After her baccalaureate, she enrolled in a faculty of economics and marketing, followed by a year’s sabbatical. After that, she took up acting for two years, before going on to study for a professional degree in Video Games at Montpellier’s Paul Valéry University. She then went on to do a Master 2 in Video Game Design at the same university. It’s a little-known degree, because the university doesn’t advertise it very much, but it’s one of the only public degrees in the field of video games in France, and therefore not very expensive. The downside is that entry is by competitive examination, because places are limited, so it takes a lot of work beforehand. If Marie had failed her entrance exam, she would have stayed in the theatre and we certainly wouldn’t have had the chance to have the studio’s games as they are today.

Alongside all this, Marie has been making games on her own since she was 13. Even if they’re only ‘small’ games, she advises anyone who wants to get into JV to make them. It allows you to immerse yourself in the logic and thinking that goes into creating this kind of content. Even if each studio has its own way of doing things, the basics are always the same. And, of course, we can’t stress this enough: go to game jams, because as well as learning how to create a game, these experiences teach you how to position yourself in a team. It’s complicated to grasp without jumping in, and jams have the advantage that failure has no consequences. Another important point is that the limited time means you have to concentrate on what’s essential, and have the satisfaction of finishing a project. Even as professionals, Marie and the SplashTeam still jam from time to time, as it gives them a chance to breathe during a development process that lasts for years. During her studies, Marie and some university friends set up an augmented reality mobile games company. The school allowed them to work full time on the project rather than attend lectures. For a year and a half, they worked on video games in partnership with the city of Montpellier and its theatre. It was at this point that she met a man called Romain, who helped her change direction, because mobile gaming wasn’t for her. The market was saturated by a handful of huge studios, so finding a place in it was mission impossible. The associated business models, such as microtransactions, don’t suit Marie’s vision, even if she understands those who do. The mobile market is unique in that gamers are not used to buying a game, they are consumers of free-to-play with in-game purchases.

Teamwork

Today, Marie is co-creative director of SplashTeam, the independent studio she founded with Romain Claude. Romain’s experience of big productions came from working at Ubisoft, where he worked on Rayman Raving Rabbids, Raving Rabbids: The Big Adventure, Rayman Origins, Rayman Legends, Season After Fall and Paper Beast. Marie went straight for the indie route, which she thinks is perhaps a mistake. She watched the famous Indie Game: The movie when she was at university, after which she said to herself that she would never do that. But because, of course, there’s a ‘but’, Marie is someone who knows how to do a lot of things, she doesn’t excel at anything, but she’s what we call a Swiss Army knife. Her skills include integration, 2D animation and project management, so she’s involved in a lot of things. It’s a way of working that’s not possible in big companies. The independent world is the only place where you can break out of the boxes that exist in big productions. She confesses, however, that she’s glad that not everyone is like her, because otherwise it would be difficult to put a team together. If we go back to the origins of the studio, even before the idea was hatched, the first game we should mention is Splasher, made by two people, including Romain. It’s a 2D platformer with a cartoon atmosphere in which you have to save your colleagues in a painting company. Make no mistake about it, the game is demanding and you’ll need good reflexes to get through the twenty-two levels.

Marie joined Romain for the second production, Tinykin. The duties were divided up as follows: Romain was responsible for game design, game feel, level design and technical aspects, while Marie was in charge of storytelling, graphics, integration and the script. This time round, our ambitions were revised upwards, so it was necessary to create a company, and so the famous SplashTeam was born! Above all, it was the desire to have their title published that prompted them to create a proper company. So it was in 2020 that the team began prototyping, in a ‘garage dev’ atmosphere, with the scriptwriter, a certain Benoît Marquet, Marie’s brother. And let’s not forget Alexis Laugier, who is in charge of the music, also known for his work on Have A Nice Death. The biggest problem in setting up the studio was finding the funds to produce the demo, so it was their personal funds that were committed at the time, which meant we had to optimise as much as possible. During this period, Romain and Marie didn’t earn a salary, so she feels lucky to have worked with people who were willing to bet on the future of the studio and to be paid when cash flow allowed. Naturally, all those involved in the project were paid as soon as possible. It’s very rare to find this kind of cohesion, which is understandable, but it’s certainly what makes the team so close-knit. We were able to get started because Romain has experience as a game designer and developer, and Marie has a creative background, so she had a lot of experience of sketching out a project. What was most lacking was an artistic director, as there was no artist as such in the team. Clearly, even if they succeeded, Marie wouldn’t advise approaching a publisher without having an artistic direction to present. The first contact with a game is a visual one, and it’s complicated to sign up a publisher solely on the basis of gameplay.

The big leagues

To approach a publisher, they produced a whole raft of documents, including a pitch deck (a summary of the project in a few slides), a game design document, a schedule, a budget estimate and a prototype. These four brains came up with a demo that was presented to a number of publishers, except that Tiny Build had contacted them on Twitter. The SplashTeam communicates a lot about their current projects. The publisher fell in love with the game at first sight and that’s how the negotiations started. This little stroke of luck is often what makes the difference between a game being spotted or a title falling into the unknown. With so much being produced around the world, hard work and the will to succeed aren’t always enough. We owe this publisher titles such as Hello Neighbor and Graveyard Keeper, big fish in the small indie world. After 3 years’ work and a staff of thirteen, the production team moved on to offer the famous Tinykin in August 2022. The game met with great success, particularly in the United States. It was released on all platforms, and even won a Gamepass deal that quickly made the project profitable, with hundreds of thousands of downloads. For Gamepass, it was meeting the right people at the right time that made the difference. Tinykin is a game with a fairly striking artistic direction, with 2D characters evolving in a 3D world. Even though the original team had an idea of what the final product was going to look like, it was Simon Troussellier, the artistic director, who managed to bring it all together. It’s difficult, when you’re not an artist, to put down on paper what you have in your head. That’s when the studio started to gain notoriety.

To recap, the game is a kind of Pikmin in which there are no enemies; the little creatures that follow you will mainly help you solve puzzles. It wasn’t necessarily a design idea that was present at the start of the project. What was certain was that he wanted to make a 3D platformer with a touch of the Nintendo game, but as things progressed, the concept deviated from the main inspiration to become more action than strategy. We owe this evolution to Romain, a big fan of fast-paced action games. Marie is keen to point out that their Tinykin adventure went very well.

A new rendez-vous

At present, the team, which has since been strengthened, is working on the Acornia (Ex Rendez-vous) project. It’s a patisserie management game, and we’ll come back to that later. At the time Marie and I spoke, they were looking for a new publisher for the project, and as I write these lines, they’ve succeeded. At this point we are touching on the reality of independence: signing a game with a publisher does not mean that subsequent productions will necessarily be handled by that publisher. As the Arconia project did not fit in with Tiny Build’s editorial line, the Splash Team had to find another partner. They preferred to keep the project they had in mind rather than align themselves with the expectations of their first financial backer – that’s the price of independence.

At the time of our interview (February 2024), the team consisted of seven people, and was due to increase to thirteen once the publisher had been signed. At the studio in Montpellier, five people work face-to-face, while the rest of the team work remotely. We were talking about the transparency of the studio, but on their new project, this has taken on even greater proportions, as Marie has created a Twitch channel on which she is developing the game live, so there are no secrets about the production of the title. The Acornia project is a patisserie/tea shop management game in which you play as Alva, a small rodent with the ability to store a whole host of items in his jowls and spit them out onto his customers’ tables. It’s a cross between Stardew Valley and Cult of the Lamb, as the resources you need to move forward are found in dungeons filled with enemies and boss battles that are a little out of the ordinary. Do you think that’s weird? You should also know that all this takes place in a tree, which itself is in a snow globe! That’s the creative freedom that makes the independent world so interesting. On this second project, the roles have changed a little from those mentioned on Tinykin: Marie is creative director and Romain is game director. The entire team and their roles, as well as a whole host of other information, are available on the studio’s website (https://www.splashteam-games.com/).

Being a woman in video games

There’s one subject I haven’t touched on yet in Game’n Breakfast, because I’m not really well placed to do so, and that’s the experience of a woman in the world of video games. So I took the opportunity to talk to Marie and ask her about it. Clearly, it’s not easy being a woman in this business. At first she thought it wouldn’t be a problem for her, which turned out not to be the case. It’s complicated to get respect. While this isn’t a problem on a day-to-day basis because the studio team is friendly, it’s more the people outside the studio who cause problems. From the founding of the SplashTeam, which they built together, according to some, it was thanks to Romain that she had this opportunity. When, clearly, it was the two of them who spent a year pulling all-nighters and working without pay. It’s important to point out that Romain never had an attitude that allowed him to think that way, it’s really an interpretation by people outside the project. A blatant example: during professional discussions, the interlocutor would only address Romain, leaving Marie out of the conversation. Years later, Marie has grown in character and doesn’t hesitate to reframe men who behave in this way. Even today, in 2024, we still hear that women succeed because of their looks or, simply, attempts to belittle anyone who isn’t male. Although machismo has never had a place in the studio, Marie is regularly confronted with it, and has to fight twice as hard to achieve her goals. Despite everything, she manages to stay the course, because she’s surrounded by caring people who have defended her all along the way. As I was saying, she now has the weapons, an ‘American talking point’, to deal with this kind of behaviour, which has disappeared, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t crop up again. It’s a subject that’s becoming more and more important in our society, but we still play down far too much the daily struggle of women, not to mention the LGBT cause, to be recognised as equal to men. When she expresses misogynistic behaviour, such as not looking her in the eye when you talk to her, she is regularly told that she is exaggerating.

Marie’s advice to those who want to get into indie development is to make games even if you don’t know how to do everything. A programmer who isn’t a graphic designer can use ‘placeholders’ (basic geometric shapes that replace the game’s graphical elements) and a graphic designer who isn’t a programmer can create concepts that they can format with game engines that don’t require any code (the best known being Construct). So don’t hold back, make games! Loads of them! Break your teeth, it’s great fun. The second is “don’t have too much ego”. For Marie, this is the bane of the video game industry: there are either people who have no self-confidence at all, or people who are overflowing with it. Producing a game means going through a lot of iterations, constantly changing things, even starting from scratch. For someone with too much ego, this is uncomfortable from a personal point of view. It’s difficult to make people understand that what has been produced does not correspond to the needs or expectations that are likely to change during production. On a personal level, this is something I’ve also found in the tattoo world, which may be easier for some people to understand, where getting a design redone can sometimes be very confrontational. You have to put your heart into your work, but not your soul either. Marie knows this well, because when she arrived in the JV world, she had too much ego. It was Romain who brought her down, and the playtests too. We’ve mentioned it several times, but these test sessions are a no-holds-barred affair. When something doesn’t work, it’s obvious. You can make excuses for the first player who can’t understand a mechanic, but when there are two, three or four of them, you have to seriously question yourself.

For those new to independent video games, if any of you are reading this, it’s good to know that these are productions that have a lot more creative freedom. It’s thanks to this freedom that we can find nuggets like The Short Hike, Undertale, What’s Remain of Edith Finch (and other titles that you can pick out in this article). On the other hand, working as an independent brings with it a lot of problems that the big studios don’t have, such as being understaffed. In a very small team, even the slightest illness has a huge impact. At SplashTeam, we don’t crunch even though it’s commonplace among indie and triple AAA studios. Don’t believe the boss, ask the team, but when you see them working together, you can smell the good humour a mile away. The big teams have other worries, of course. But the indie team are people who are passionate about what they do and who put their heart and soul into it, so be cool with them. *Wink* Constructive criticism is welcome, but please keep your hate to yourself.

The last question

Then it’s time for the tough question, THE game that has left its mark on Marie. For her, it depends on the period. She cites Fur Fighter (2000), a Dreamcast game in which you play stuffed animals that use firearms, as the forerunner of Pal World. It’s a game in which you get the feeling that the developers let themselves go and did the project that made them laugh. It’s a bit like what they tried to reproduce in Tinykin, which features a foam party in a bathtub with disco balls, a nod to a joke from the time the game was being developed. It’s a spirit they’d like to see in every game they make. Even though we tend to think that if we have fun creating the game, the players will have fun in turn, the little step back sometimes makes us realise that we’ve gone a little too far. The important thing is that it’s not just a ‘private joke’, but more than that. Think of The Binding of Isaac, which is full of Edmund McMillen’s delirium, I’ll leave you to judge the state of the man’s mental health.

We’ve come to the end of this episode, which marks the end of November. I don’t know about you, but even if certain subjects recur from one episode to the next, each person’s vision is different and helps to pinpoint all the subtleties of video game design. For my part, I won’t let you end 2024 without one last Game’n Breakfast. On the last Sunday of next month, I invite you to meet a man I really wanted to meet. Sébastien Bénard has done me the honour of giving me some of his time to talk about his career before, during and after Motion Twin, his next game and his vision of the industry and the problems it faces. I hope you all have a good Sunday, and until the next GnB, we’ll be seeing you on the podcast or on the Point’n Think Discord.

Play well, play fun, play indie!