Game’n Breakfast : Sébastien Bénard

It’s the last Sunday of the month and December or not, here’s Game’n Breakfast. It’s time to sit back, relax, have a cup of coffee, digest the family meal and feel good. For the last issue of the year, after Marie Marquet, I’d like to invite you to sit down with Sébastien Bénard, formerly of Motion Twin and founder of Deepknight Games. There’s no need to rush – we won’t be previewing Tenjutsu. Today we’re going to be talking about early access, gamefeel and game jam. It’s been a real pleasure talking to him, as he’s not one to be stingy about sharing his experiences. So I’ll let you enjoy these few lines, and see you at the end.

Sébastien started coding when he was very young, on Atari. What pushed him into this field was that famous ‘programming language’ floppy disk that you always ended up stumbling across after looking at all the games – there was no Internet in those days. But you still had to digest the big book that came with it. His older brother had already explored the subject and helped him a lot to acquire the basics. He immediately liked the idea of creating things using code, the Lego syndrome. The important difference is that you can get someone to play, who in turn can get someone else to play without the designer being there. The idea unfolds on its own, and that’s what got his brain twisting, getting other people to play with your creation. Although this desire has never left him, working in JV was not on the agenda. In the 2000s, it was an obscure voice, not a career plan. He went on to study computer science in order to get into web programming, the thing of the moment that caught his eye.

Sébastien then meets the people who will give his life a new direction, the people who will open the doors to Motion Twin. It’s just a summer job, but the enthusiasm is real. In this job, he rediscovers everything he loved as a kid: prototypes, mini-games, gameplay mechanics. Sébastien designed video games from the age of seven until his late teens, before switching to applications programming for his higher education. Logically, he ended up working for good at the Bordeaux studio. The company had just been set up, so everything had to be done at a time when it was far from easy. Although the ideas were there from the start, it was only in 2005, four years after its creation, that Motion Twin took on the status of a Société Coopérative et Participative (SCOP). In simple terms, this is a status that replaces the majority partners with employees. The normally pyramidal hierarchy becomes horizontal. Everyone has the same salary, old and new, and the same say in decisions. The young studio opted for free-to-play games, quite simply, because that’s what was working at the time. Meeting people from prizee.com opened the door to their web gaming platform. Why free-to-play? Partly to experiment with ways of getting players to pay for content on the web. In the early 2000s, this was not widespread in Europe. Sébastien thought it was an interesting and healthy model, but his opinion has changed since then. Like many things, it’s a tool, so its relevance will depend above all on who uses it and how. What he liked was the idea of being able to play the essentials for free and only buying if the player wanted more. In the early days of free-to-play, a game considered to be pay-to-win was shot down, whereas today it’s commonplace. Motion Twin was therefore trying to maintain a level playing field, regardless of what players spent. They explored this model for around fifteen years, using 2D platform games, management games and simulation games. Then came the explosion of smartphone gaming. Motion Twin tried to convert to this model, but they didn’t like what happened to free-to-play mobile games. Their last chance was to try their hand at traditional PC gaming, and that’s when they came up with what was to become Dead Cells, initially intended to follow the same business model as web games. As development progressed, the game became the rogue-lite we know today, whose success is, in part, due to the fact that it was released in the right niche, according to Sébastien. The game was released on 7 August 2018 and he continued to work on it for another year before leaving the studio because the team couldn’t agree on what projects to follow. Sébastien wanted to make games, but not the one to do so in the shadow of Dead Cells, a bit like a music group surviving on a single hit album. To be sure of retaining the creative freedom he enjoys so much, he decided to go solo as a developer for the rest of his projects. He now has his own studio, Deepknight Games, where he makes games on his own scale, as and when he feels like it. The first title to come out of this solo venture is Nuclear Blaze. In it, we take on the role of a fireman who sets off to explore an underground base where strange events linked to an artefact are taking place. Anyone who thinks there’s a link with the SCP foundation will have had the wrong idea, because that’s what it was supposed to be. Sébastien found the concept around the SCP anomalies very conducive to developing content around it. When he wanted to canonise his game, he discovered that all the foundation’s official content had to be free, and that video games were his bread and butter. There’s no new anomaly from Sébastien Bénard, just a fun game born of a very personal desire. It’s a concept he tried out at a game jam, and the idea came about because firefighting has real gameplay potential. Beyond that, it’s also a game with a children’s mode, because Sébastien wanted his son, who was three at the time, to be able to play it. The game was conceived as something he could pass on to his son, to show him the fruits of his labour.

When you analyse the productions Sébastien has worked on, you quickly see that the emphasis is on game feel. He uses the ‘Blizzard’ method, back when they were cool of course, which can be found in Overwatch, Diablo, Starcraft and World of Warcraft. They haven’t reinvented the wheel, but they do what they do well. The idea is to mix an innovative concept with a lot of simple mechanics, but it has to feel good in the hand. For Sébastien, this is more effective than trying to be original everywhere. So it’s a principle he implements in his games. For example, a poorly thought-out inventory system can ruin a game. That’s why he tries to fine-tune everything, from the sound and feel of weapons to the reward you get when you pick up an item. Focusing on feedback to try and transcend a small mechanic. If the reward of a gameplay loop is effective, the player will want to return to it. It’s an operating method that was difficult to implement in web games because they were limited by the ergonomics of the site. But he applied it to Dead Cells. If you take the smallest gameplay loop in the game, i.e. killing an enemy, it gives you gold or cells. Sébastien has spent an inordinate amount of time ensuring that, even after two hundred times, the player is still just as entertained. He wanted to polish this micro-loop before thinking about the rest. Repetitive actions have to be fun, there can’t be any bad deaths or bad enemy reactions. When we extend this concept to the rogue-lite style, this polish means that after a death, the player instantly finds pleasure again, so that they want to restart the game. In concrete terms, for Sébastien, achieving an effective game feel isn’t very complicated – it’s just a set of very simple tricks that need to be used without exception. A blow should make the enemy blink, distorting it a little, taking damage should make the camera shake, a jumping character should flatten a little on impact – that’s Sébastien’s starter pack, the ABCs for any developer. The aim of all this is to give you a feel for the impact and power (of the character or the enemies). Take all that away and you’ll feel like you’re controlling a pole or punching through an enemy. There’s no secret about it, just look at all these little things when you’re playing – most games are full of them. Sébastien doesn’t understand developers who don’t use his feedback, he applies it right from the prototype. Some recent titles miss out on this juicy feeling.

As a solo developer, Sébastien has to master many things, including level design. There are a large number of development tools available, such as code editors and asset managers. In terms of level design, it’s pretty poor. Tiled, the best known, is powerful but catastrophic in terms of ergonomics, worthy of the Windows 98 era and its greyish tones. This design is one of the tasks with which Sébastien feels least comfortable. So he decided to work on his projects with this unwelcoming tool. Since you’re never better served than by yourself, he finally decided to create his own tool, LDTK, in which he transposes his knowledge of game feel. It’s a piece of software that he develops according to his projects and needs. After Nuclear Blaze, the tool seemed effective, so he decided to make it public and open source. It has now become a fully-fledged project that is used by other developers.

While we’re on the subject of the solitary aspect of his work, after Motion Twin Sébastien needed to be alone to prototype and develop his ideas. On Nuclear Blaze, he produced everything except the music, which he entrusted to someone else, Pentadrangle. The reason was that he wanted to work with this person more than he really needed to. So he seized the opportunity. Another thing he delegated was localisation because, strangely enough, Sébastien doesn’t speak fifteen languages. When it comes to a project as a whole, he prefers to work alone as much as possible. On Tenjustu, a game currently in development, there are two of them, if you don’t count Devolver, who handles marketing. Sébastien is supported by a graphic designer who handles the character animation. As for the rest of the artistic direction, Sébastien still has some work to do to define what he really wants. Looking back, he thinks he just doesn’t know how to work in a team any more and doesn’t want to learn again. The fact that he’s dabbled in everything has enabled him to develop a huge range of skills, to get out of his comfort zone, and he finds that stimulating.

Several people who have been through Game’n Breakfast have advised beginners to take part in game jams to get the hang of it. Sébastien, who is starting to gain experience, still takes part. When you’re developing a project, it’s important to think about the end goal. In this context, there are problems with scope, menus, options and endings, which end up restricting creative freedom. These are constraints that you don’t find at a jam, where everything is reduced to the simplest expression of creativity. All you have to do is set up a gameplay loop, possibly with a punchline if there’s a narrative aspect. To put it simply, these are projects in which we leave aside the secondary aspects that make a commercial video game a total product and concentrate on an experiment, a gameplay idea. As a result, jam games are not necessarily games that are easy to exploit later on. A good idea doesn’t necessarily make a good game. As a veteran, but also as a beginner, it’s a very good exercise, even a breath of fresh air. This exercise is a very good representation of the creation of a game, all condensed into forty-eight hours (time varies depending on the jam). The time/learning ratio is unbeatable. There’s pre-production, production and marketing. Social networks are important for getting the word out about your game at voting time. So my advice is still the same: if you want to make games, do game jams. These are experiences that will allow you to talk about creating games with other enthusiasts or professionals. Of course, you won’t know how to do everything in detail, but it’s an excellent way of getting started. Sébastien even recommends getting into solo formats, with the right tools. Unity or Unreal aren’t the most accessible; Construct or Game Maker are the best. Working on your own forces you to look at aspects that you’d leave to others if you were working in a team. You end up thinking about issues that you’d never thought about before. On the marketing side, you have to think about how to design your post and choose the right gif. If you’re looking at sound design, you have to think about how to create the sound design and the music in a short space of time. This opens up the possibility of discovering a new area of interest, or even adding a new string to your bow. As for Nuclear Blaze and Tenjustu, which both came out of jam sessions, these were projects that were well received at the time. What prompted him to develop these concepts was not necessarily their rankings, but more the feedback they received from those who played them. It’s proof that something speaks to gamers, and if Sébastien enjoyed working on it, the idea seems a good one to turn into a commercial project. Nuclear Blaze had a special status in that it was Sébastien’s first solo game. He had set himself the goal of staying within a limited scope, he didn’t want to get lost. The mechanics he had put in place were quickly exhausted, so it made sense for the game to be short. On the other hand, Tenjustu, his current project, really grew out of a concept that struck a chord at a jam. Initially, he didn’t want to make it a rogue-lite because he felt he’d done all he could with the genre. But as he developed what he’d created, he quickly realised that the combat mechanics had potential. It was a good start for a prototype. As mentioned above, one of the advantages of jams is that they allow you to test out an idea. Games such as Terranil, Minami Lane and Dome Keeper were created during jams.

How can you talk to Sébastien without touching on the world of independence, starting with the famous indipocalypse? For him, it’s a very big word. His vision is to be taken with a pinch of salt: “I’ve been successful”. He believes that we are currently living in the golden age of video games, where there has never been a better confluence between ease of production, ease of distribution and public interest. That’s why we’ve got nuggets like Animal Well, produced by two people in 2 years, which would never have reached us otherwise. We’ve heard a lot about the ten thousand games that will be released on Steam in 2023. There’s an excellent article on the subject on Howtomarketagame.com. Of these titles, very few have more than ten reviews. Which just goes to show that while anyone can make a game, it’s not that easy. There’s a lot of storytelling around the success of certain productions, but we mustn’t forget that releasing a game is still a miracle. To make a commercial product a success requires a lot of investment, emotional lifts and a dash of luck. The real bummer in all this is the finances, how to survive long enough to make a game. In France, we have the privilege of being able to rely on unemployment insurance, while it still exists, which is the primary investor in independent developers. There are also regional associations that act as (vital) central points of information (editor’s note: their continued existence is no longer certain, if we take the Pays de la Loire as an example) on the various sources of funding or subsidies, such as the CNC’s writing grants. But the main resource remains the energy to manage the design, but also the administration, marketing and all the little things that go with it to make the project cool. If, as a solo developer, or even a duo, it’s possible to get by and find an audience, it becomes more complicated to survive as a medium-sized or large studio. Costs have exploded, while revenues have not increased in the same way. The intersection of these two curves is, according to Sébastien, one of the reasons for the large number of redundancies we are seeing today, which can be likened to an apocalypse. As a boy, he remembers being impressed by the storytelling of Microsoft, which was founded in a garage. Today, he has the impression that a number of companies are in this ‘garage’ phase and that it’s working rather well. Even if it’s not set in stone, he doesn’t see anything that could interfere with that. There’s a connection between creators and consumers that provides a very good context for video games. If we focus on independent games, their strength lies in their innovation, which arouses interest among gamers and pushes big platforms like Gamepass to promote them. In this way, a kind of virtuous circle is created that will last as long as innovation is present. This has led to the emergence of titles like Backpack Hero and 1000xResist. If we go back 15 years, this is a model that would not have been possible, simply because distribution was more difficult. But you can’t take it for granted that it’s a walk in the park – bringing a project to fruition requires a solid backbone, but it’s less of a struggle as long as you stay within a small scope. Of course, that doesn’t explain the crisis situation faced by a whole host of studios and individuals, caused by multiple reasons, but that’s not the subject here.

Dead Cells was one of the first to offer structured early access with a very clear road map, so I took the opportunity to ask Sébastien his opinion on this kind of very fashionable business model. He particularly likes the example of Manor Lords, where the developer has expressed his desire not to get too big, while at the same time being open and transparent about his approach to early access. For Sébastien, the secret to good early access is honesty, not making promises you can’t keep. On Dead Cells, from the outset, players knew the end date, a year later, because the team felt that the lack of an end date would be a problem. The aim was for players to enjoy this period. In the patchnotes, Motion Twin clearly identified the changes that came from the community to show the impact of the community on the game. Sébastien thinks that this is something that should become more widespread, always with a view to transparency. The sensitive point is that to put all this in place, there’s a huge amount of community management work involved in planning and making announcements. Early access is a bit like going behind the scenes and playing the role of a showrunner. It’s far from a simple beta. We had to distil the content over a year, arouse curiosity and animate. There’s very little room for improvisation. Even if, as we said, we have to take players’ opinions into account (within reasonable limits), it’s above all a major marketing operation that has to be controlled and dynamic, and therefore anticipated. If we look back at Manor Lords, its early access began to cause controversy because the updates weren’t regular enough for some people’s tastes. It’s worth noting that on this game, the developer is solo, so it’s almost impossible to respond to this kind of demand with quality. At the start of Dead Cells early access, the idea was to make one major update per month, but the team soon found itself faced with a frantic pace. As well as having to develop and market content, we had to establish a real coherence in the update – a whole biome with monsters and a boss, for example, not just small changes here and there. In the end, the pace was reduced to one update every two months. For all these reasons, Sébastien is still considering the idea of offering early access to Tenjutsu.

On a different note, Sébastien recalls a conversation he had with Markus Persson aka Notch, the developer of Minecraft. He has played the game a lot and holds its creator in very high regard. The developers ended up talking to each other because they were both taking part in Ludum Dare (game jams). In a conversation on the late Twitter, Notch explained that he was disgusted with gamedev because the success of his game had made him so much money that he didn’t know what to do with it. The Swedish developer had lost the desire to work, even going so far as to halt development of the successor to Minecraft. It’s something that Sébastien finds frightening, the loss of his desire to create. If there’s one thing we can remember about Sébastien, it’s that he’s driven by a passion for video games, for doing things well and for creativity.

Before he leaves us, he won’t escape the last question that has become a Game’n Breakfast tradition: Which game would you recommend? If he had to talk about game feel, Diablo III (2012), even if it’s criticised, ticks a lot of boxes in this area, you can feel that the user experience has been pushed very far. He also considered The Elder Scroll II: Daggerfall (1996), but felt it was too hard to tackle. His final choice was System Shock 2 (1999) because it’s a retro game that hasn’t aged much. Nowadays, it’s still fun to play and still delivers, albeit in a subdued way, what it did at the time of its release. It has many of the same elements as today’s games: the RPG aspect, the exploration, the ‘vania’ aspect, the storytelling and the horror. It’s a title that offers epiphanies (the sensation of solving a mystery that previously seemed unsolvable). In his eyes, it’s a masterclass in game design, level design and storytelling.

Here we are in the final lines of the last GnB of 2024. Seven issues in, seven rewarding encounters. As well as discovering unique profiles, we’ve been able to share our visions of the world of video games. I hope you come away as curious as I am. In the interests of diversity, I’ve decided to open up my criteria even further. That’s why, starting next month, we’ll be moving away from developer profiles and talking about communications and funding with Freddi Malavasi from Draw Me A Pixel. In the meantime, I’d like to thank you, whether you’re a loyal reader or just passing by, and I’ll see you very soon.