Game’n Breakfast : Séverin – Minishoot’ Adventures
It’s back to school time for Game’n Breakfast! After a summer ‘break’ that enabled me to bring you the feature on Disability, Neuroatypia, Phobia, etc.: Video games beyond entertainment, I’m back, not to play a trick on you, but to resume the monthly rhythm of GnB. We said goodbye in June with the issue devoted to Ostrealava02, the romhacker. Today I’m off to meet Argl, first name Séverin, one of the two soulgame members behind Minishoot’ Adventures, a game that straddles the line between shoot ’em up and adventure. Around this game, we discussed his vision of game design, the mistakes he thinks he made and many other things that I’ll let you discover. For a bit of context, our conversation goes back to April, a few weeks after the game’s release. I’m getting a bit of a head start on my interviews to make sure I can keep up the pace (and tease a bit). Enough jokes! Let’s go for another coffee break with a professional from the JV world.
An atypical childhood
Argl, like a number of freelancers, is self-taught. His originality, if I can call it that, is that most of his schooling was done at home. He never had to go to school, at least until the third year. During this period, he had one hour of school a week, during which his mother gave him the tests that the French education system requires him to pass. Contrary to what you might think, video games were banned at home, so he spent his time making things out of cardboard.
At the age of 12, Séverin got his hands on Macromedia Flash, which was to become Adobe Flash, now defunct. For those who don’t know, Flash was a technology that was widely used on the Internet to create browser games, among other things. So he began creating Pokémon battle animations, and then very quickly games, as he himself described them. His creations quickly multiplied. On top of that, he worked on music, the piano, the guitar and especially the drums, because he wanted to be a musician. For him, these two areas were the real apprenticeships of his childhood. The first flash game he released, which was free to play (it was a different era), was an instant success, with one hundred thousand views in a short space of time, then two hundred thousand until it reached one million. Beginner’s luck, you might say, but that’s not the case at all, because although this was the first game he released, he had already produced more than two hundred that never made it to players.
To this story, we must add his cousin, Adrien alias Kuho, with whom he regularly went and with whom he played video games. During their holidays, the duo would always come up with game concepts, one week working on Final Fantasy 7, the next working on an idea. They spent years working on RPGs and other playable games, but never finished them. As for his schooling, he did his three years at lycée, which were difficult – sitting in class all day when he’d had one hour a week before, the contrast was too great. What for him had the air of a penal colony still had the advantage of being able to meet other people. He went on to do a DUT in IT, to get a degree, which he gave up after six months because it was clearly game creation that he wanted to do, something he has never stopped doing.
Taking a leap forward, Séverin, twenty-two, gives piano lessons, but this activity bores him. Video games are an ever-present part of his daily life, so he decided to set up a project and finish it. In three days, he created a car game that made him want to try it again and take it further. After nine months, he released his Driver, which was played by a hundred thousand players directly. His title aroused interest on the Armor Game website, the benchmark for flash games, which offered him three thousand dollars in sponsorship. It didn’t pay for nine months’ work, but it was his first income from a game. It was at this point that he realised he could make a living from his Flash creations. He became unemployed and, for five years, devoted himself to development.
From Flash to Unity
From then on, he kept up the rhythm of one game a year. Chronologically, Rogue Soul, Gentleman, Rogue Soul 2 and then Swords Soul have all met with growing success. For those of you who are curious, I invite you to visit the studio’s website to discover these nuggets: soulgamestudio.com. This success story had a little accident, Gentleman is a bit of a misstep, the success was not there. Even though he is the one who initiates and manages the projects, the childhood habits are still there, and he inevitably ends up going to see Adrien, who is in charge of the artistic direction and whose recognisable style is present in each of the games. This pencil stroke, which he has had since he was a child, enables him to transpose Séverin’s ideas beyond expectations. These years of playing together have been the basis of a solid relationship and a mutual understanding that is close to perfection.
After these five flash games, the duo turned a corner with Swords and Souls, which was so successful that it topped the rankings on a number of sites, and is still on kongregate.com, the portal where Séverin played during his studies and where he dreamed of seeing one of his projects. And so it came to pass in 2015. He currently has over thirteen million players on Kongregate alone, and estimates that he will reach sixty million overall. At the time, it was all about microtransactions in games, which they have always refused to do, so he only received nine thousand dollars in sponsorship. With Flash technology dying out, Armor Game offered to develop a sequel for Steam. There was a major change in the way they proceeded, as this time they had to use an engine that would be Unity. Another radical change was that Séverin, who was used to working on a project for a few months at a time, spent four years on this second episode, assisted by Adrien on a full-time basis at the end of production. The development process was, in his words, “extremely hot”, but they are very satisfied with the result. The transition wasn’t magical, and the millions of players (of the free game) didn’t rush out to buy the sequel, but they ended up selling two hundred thousand units, which is something to be proud of.
After the huge mental burden of this change of direction, the years of development and the few weeks before launch (close to crunch time), the cousins decided to go back to small games. So they set about making a small metroid-like shooter that could be completed in three weeks. We’ll know this game four years later as Minishoot’ Adventures. Severin concedes that restricting himself to a small scope is not easy, and that the fact that the project has grown to such an extent is proof of immaturity in design. The progress on the game was a bit blind, without really defining what they wanted before getting started. It’s very difficult to be convincing with very little material, and minimalism leaves little room for error.
Minishoot’ Adventures
The little game quickly grew by adding different elements to legitimise its proposition. Minishoot’ Adventures is a short story, a world to explore, ninety enemies, four bosses, modules, NPCs, upgrades, lots of secrets and a lot of polish. That’s all Séverin and Adrien needed to make the game work, from their point of view.
Going back to the genesis of the project, Séverin loves minimalist shooters, initially in Flash, and now he’s jumping on the slightest representative of the genre on Steam, which is always disappointing. The execution and gameplay loops are never to his taste, and the only one he says he really likes is Aster. In this one, he rediscovers what he loves, the ‘peek-a-boo, Boom! That’s the feeling he wanted to reproduce by adding exploration and a hint of Metroid, with arenas and, finally, a few bosses. The gameplay is heavily inspired by Zolg, a little arcade shooter that’s all about shooting and dodging as you walk around. The principle takes us back to our childhood games (in real life!) where we walked around simulating a weapon, cowboy or otherwise, on imaginary enemies. What they were looking for, before a minimalist game, was above all primitive and efficient gameplay, with very little to manage. What I really appreciated when I played the game was the aesthetic that emerged from certain enemy shooting patterns, mainly bosses. The geometry of the criss-crossing shots that fill the screen, forcing the player to attempt impossible dodges, is a feast for the eyes. On this subject, Séverin remembers a game that made a big impression on him, Bullet Heaven 2, which, as well as moving away from bullet hell scoring games, offers a universe and continuous progression. All of which is to say that for Minishoot’ Adventures, he concentrated enormously on the shooting sensation, and pared down the rest as much as possible.
To tell you a little about my experience with the game, I won’t need to go into too much detail, as it’s so easy to understand the appeal of the game without saying too much. So, in anticipation of our chat, I launched into a short game, the aim not being to judge but just to know what I’m talking about. So I start off at the controls of my ship, the main character, and set off to explore this new world teeming with various enemies. I soon realise that our starting point is, in fact, a village whose inhabitants are trapped in a corrupt world. Fight after fight, puzzle after puzzle, secret after secret, and very quickly I realise that I won’t put the controller down until the mystery is completely solved. That’s the strength of this Minishoot’ Adventures, the first simplistic glimpse hides a game teeming with things to discover and challenges to take up, and that’s when you catch a glimpse of the inspiration that isn’t obvious at first glance, I was playing a game that is a tribute to the old Legend of Zelda.
Marketing and accessibility
I’m not the only one to have felt this way, Séverin has had several comments along these lines. Perhaps it was a mistake not to have emphasised this, to have proposed a name that was too simple. The marketing doesn’t reflect the richness of Minishoot’ Adventures enough. In his opinion, what’s lacking to make it a real adventure game are moments that are a little more elaborate, a few cutscenes that highlight the universe in which you’re evolving, like those you’ll find in Tunic for connoisseurs. Talking of communication, the game has been the subject of paid promotions with certain steamers. This method wasn’t easy for Séverin, who isn’t a big fan of the world of influencers. There are two things that finally made him lean towards the stream side. The first is that he knows his game is honest, viewers really see what the game is about, it’s not a gatcha full of microtransactions. The second is fatigue: after giving so much, he couldn’t accept that he’d worked for nothing. His game had to have a chance of finding its audience, and today Twitch is the best way to get the word out. Vampire Survivor would probably never have sold so many copies if it hadn’t passed through the hands of so many streamers around the world.
Very quickly, the developers began to think about accessibility, because they wanted the game to be playable by children. The automatic targeting mechanic was born of this desire and then, one thing leading to another, a whole range of parameters appeared: difficulty, game speed, invincibility, making the game fun for a large number of players. At first, activating the options deactivated the trophies, but in the end, for Séverin, it was all down to the players. Why shouldn’t someone who needs to reduce the difficulty to have fun be able to enjoy the achievements?
Game design
Séverin plays, he plays a lot, and he has an extensive library of video games that he adds to almost every day. There’s one thing that annoys him about trophies: spending hours looking for the collectables that are missing to unlock the achievement. That’s why he’s added a mechanic that lets you know, approximately, where the items you haven’t found are. Even the level design is built around these secrets: walk down a corridor and see a coveted item on the other side of the wall, just to let you know that access must be around the corner and not at the other end of the map. There’s even a little symbol to show that you’ve completed 100% of an area. Not frustrating the player is an important thing for Séverin. Perhaps it’s a throwback to the early days of The Legend of Zelda on the Nes, where you set off on adventures without any guides or instructions. For those who haven’t played it, it was possible to spend a good while in the game without finding the sword held by an old man at the bottom of a cave. For those who have, I’ll leave you to find the Minishoot’ Adventures screen, which refers to one of these games. There’s a lot more of Zelda in this game – the exploration, the dungeons, even the design of the map as you move from screen to screen – old-school, some might say. The feel of the gameplay is also reminiscent of his cult games – that is, if Link had borrowed the ship from a certain Starfox.
When it came to managing secrets, Séverin reflected on the evolution of the video game medium. Gone are the days when you bought a cartridge every six months and it had to last that long; gone are the school holidays that allowed you to explore every pixel. As we get older, apart from fans of souls-like games, the desire to try hard disappears, as does the time available to play. As evidence of this, some feedback pointed to a level design that wasn’t clear enough, and people got lost, which is why he was working on a map detector (the item to pick up) in the form of vibrations that intensify the closer you get. Exploration without landmarks forced some players to stop the game. It’s also due to the fact that SoulGames is a very small studio that doesn’t have the possibility of doing huge playtests, so even if they had a hundred people try out the game, it doesn’t highlight all the difficulties that can be encountered. Added to this is the need to find a happy medium between casual gamers and hardcore gamers, no game can satisfy everyone and there is enough on offer for everyone to find something to their liking. It’s up to the developer to choose who he wants to sell his work to, and for gamers to respect that choice (that’s what we call scope). Minishoot’ Adventures has succeeded in its gamble, and there’s no going back on the difficulty, whether you’re a fan of bullet hell or adventure.
A little anecdote: the playtests lasted right up to the launch of the game. The day before the big day, he received messages saying that the trophy for finishing the game in hard mode wasn’t unlocked. Without missing a beat, a potential error was found and corrected, and then a second one too. The version is clean, the game is launched! The bug still existed, and a third and then a fourth fix. In the end, six different errors could have occurred, not to mention the fact that the bug persists if you import a savegame from the demo. So Séverin ended up adding, once the game was finished in normal mode, a button to unlock this famous hard mode trophy – as he said above, it’s up to the player. This button, combined with a short message to disgruntled players, enabled him to turn some negative reviews into positive ones. Minishoot’ Adventures, by this means, has reached the fateful threshold of an extremely positive evaluation, in excess of 95%, a score Séverin still doesn’t believe in.
Development
Talking about the development period, prototyping went very quickly. The artistic direction consisted of finding the right balance between minimalism and attractiveness. What was more complicated was the level design, with lots of dungeon and overworld tests, and even an attempt to recreate the map from Zelda, the first of the name, just to see what it felt like to walk around in it. Everything was fine, the ship management was nice, the idea worked well, but (you were expecting it, weren’t you?) how were we going to get around in it? What was the game space going to be like? Screens? Mountains and lakes? It was impossible to decide. It was at this point that they made some rookie mistakes that led to choices that would determine the years to come. This is a recurring theme in video games, the classic story of a small project lasting a few months that turns into several years because people fail to understand the scope of the choices made at the start of production. The example Séverin gives is the desire to add water, which was cool. To add polish, you add particles, then a trail behind the ship, you play with the friction to make it slide a little. But then, if your universe has water, for it to be believable, you need vegetation, then a forest. Greenery means life and kingdom. What would a civilisation be without a city worthy of the name? And of course, none of this had been anticipated when the idea of adding water was conceived. This is where the minimalist game becomes a little open world with a story and biomes, and each zone has its own population of enemies. Before all this, the game had to take place on an underground map, a cave with a single visual identity, which he removed to remake a world in colour and define these famous biomes.
During the first playtests, a recurring comment was that everything looked the same. It was a revelation in terms of game design: if you want to explore, you need a world to explore. Sounds stupid, but if you think about it, it really means thinking about things differently. To be fair, the initial three-week estimate has literally exploded, which is another example of the immaturity that Séverin was talking about a few moments ago. To make players want to explore, you have to provide them with a goal. Building that goal is not necessarily easy. Séverin recalls the creation of a swamp biome in which there was a dungeon. To prevent players from getting there too quickly, he designed the area so that there were stages they had to go through to progress. Looking back, he soon realised that he was creating a dungeon around the dungeon, something very linear. In his opinion, that’s not what exploration is all about; it lacks freedom. We had to do better than that. A tower here, a cavern there, a mini boss, it’s this diversity, this choice of objective based on instinct or desire, with a discovery at the end of the day, that gives the feeling of exploration. The latest additions to The Legend of Zelda saga (Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom) have taken this concept to the extreme, with events that are completely detached from the main quest, but which make up the entire content of the game. For Nintendo, it’s a bit of a return to basics, because as we’ve seen, this uninstructed freedom was present in the first episodes. This way of exploring disappeared in the 2000s, as can be seen in the saga of The Elder Scrolls, between Morrowind, which is close (in exploration alone) to Breath of the Wild, and Skyrim, in which the quests jump out at you. It’s also for this reason that in Minishoot’ Adventures, items are placed by hand, in other words, not procedurally. Every location is carefully thought out, enemies and all. Each screen, cave or island is unique. Another important point of game design in relation to exploration is the absence of minimaps. The aim is to let the player concentrate on the action and use the environment to find their way around. The general map, which can be accessed via the menu, is only there to lighten the mental load, and can be retrieved at a later point in the zone in question to encourage and reward exploration. It’s also a tool to help players reach 100%. Séverin makes no secret of the fact that his inspiration came from Hollow Knight, a game that excels in encouraging discovery.
Based on the game mentioned above, Séverin has tried to manage frustration in his title. Each moment of tension, in research or combat, is followed by a reward, and there is always the possibility of turning back to go and find the life point or ability that will make the obstacle easier to overcome. The idea is to reach zero rage quit. Looking at the Steam reviews, it’s a successful gamble, because as I write these lines, several months after our exchange, Minishoot still has 97% positive feedback.
Music
As for the music in the game, those who have played Fez or Hyper Light Drifter will recognise the Disasterpeace inspiration in Minishoot’ Adventures. Séverin, the musician this time, is the composer. He admits to having borrowed a few notes from his American counterpart, but it’s his way of paying tribute to an artist he greatly appreciates, and we can’t really blame him. He managed to take what he liked about Disasterpeace and modify it to produce what he really wanted, what really suits him.
Another homage that can be found is Ocarina of Time (I told you, in june, that we would talk about it again). Certain chords from Ganon’s music, with its hearts, can be found in the music of the bosses in Séverin’s game, to set up a theme linked to corruption. There are other reminders of Zelda in the OST, which I’ll leave you to discover, as these compositions are a real highlight of the title. I’d like to make it clear, though, that although there are many inspirations, this is original music.
For him, music really is a release valve, because as an independent developer, wearing several hats can be a heavy burden. When the pressure gets to be too much, music is a way of venting frustration and letting your creativity flow. This OST is full of nostalgia, it’s weird,” says Séverin. It’s not at all what was initially planned. He composed a lot of different themes, but always with this melancholic imprint that contrasts with the shimmering colours of the art direction. It’s an unusual cocktail, but one we can’t get enough of.
mini post-mortem
Looking back, development was difficult. So much so that he’s questioning his process, two games in a row for which he’s spent four years, maybe there are things that need to be changed. They’ve had burnout periods of up to a month without being able to work, so the method isn’t the right one. Making a video game is cool, but not so much when the human, energy and time costs are too fundamental. It’s important to know that over these four years, as well as developing a game, the studio has taken on students for 2 or 3 months each. On the other hand, one of the trainees had drawn a map with a marsh and a forest, which gave Séverin the impetus he needed to rework the map for his game, because he wasn’t starting from a blank page.
“A quick hello to the various trainees who worked on the game, who inspired us and gave us renewed energy and good humour.”
Séverin
In a development phase, many people will tell you that it’s normal to go through slumps, to feel the pressure to create when you’re feeling empty. For Séverin, it’s easier to see what’s wrong with someone else’s work, change it and keep the rest than to have to do it on your own work from scratch. Séverin often criticises people for not taking the job of game designer seriously, but he realises that the job of producer is just as important in optimising the resources available/necessary for a production. We often forget that in addition to a programmer, an artist and a musician, you need someone who can make all these elements into a viable game.
Design is something he learnt, and I quote, through suffering, incompetence and mess. If there’s one thing he’s learnt, it’s that getting a message across and guiding the player without them seeing it are things that can’t be invented overnight. Like many other JV skills, game design (GD) requires a bit of know-how and experience to prove itself. It’s easy to see that Séverin is passionate about this subject: how to transform everything you want to get across, in terms of message and emotion, into an effective user experience. It’s still something that some teams underestimate. He also feels that Youtube content doesn’t highlight GD enough, and often talks about the difficulty of programming, hence the punchline of the moment: “99% of games on Steam have a code. On the other hand, 99% of games don’t have a functional game design“. And to support this growing need for design, it’s worth remembering that more and more engines, such as Construct, allow you to make a game with very few lines of code. It’s important to understand how you can encourage the player to take a direction, but also to go to the end of the game (I don’t need to remind you how many players don’t see the end of the games they start), there’s a real emotional impact. What Séverin has learnt from his experience is that you also have to take the role of producer seriously, which he hopes will enable him to continue making high-quality games with greater control over time and energy.
The launch
When Minishoot’ Adventures was launched, Séverin was at the end of his rope, but everything went well. Three thousand copies sold on the first day, four thousand on the second, figures that seem impossible with a concept as improbable as a Zelda mixed with a shooter. He thought that gamers wouldn’t understand what he was trying to do, which is understandable because his marketing wasn’t very good. While shooter fans were in for a treat, adventure fans had a bit of trouble letting themselves be tempted. In just a few days, the game reached five hundred reviews, 98% of which were positive, proof that the work had not been in vain. At the time of writing, around three weeks after its release, the title had sold thirty thousand units, three times more than the twelve-month estimate, which will allow the studio to continue and finance the next project. There’s no shortage of ideas; he comes up with a new concept every fortnight, so in four years he’s got plenty to choose from. I’m not at liberty to share any prototypes with you, but one thing’s for sure: they’re going to keep up their habit of following up with a game that has nothing to do with the previous one. That’s the advantage of being independent, you don’t have to stick to an editorial line if you don’t want to, but it also means you have to relearn things every time you change your style of game, which can impinge on the creative aspect.
Séverin says he was driven by a childhood dream of wanting to play the game in his head. As long as he doesn’t have it in his hands, he continues to build on it. Every time he gets the urge to play a game that doesn’t exist, he sets himself the goal of creating it. That’s what happened with Minishoot’ Adventures. He hopes that someone will like the idea enough to take it back and make a bigger, cooler game. He doesn’t claim to be creating a new style of gameplay, but he’d be pleased to see it emulated.
French indie game
Speaking of other developers, Séverin is a member of Slack (a collaborative communication platform) for French developers. It’s a community where there’s a great atmosphere and a lot of mutual support. Even though he’s a loner by nature, he feels at home here. This year, he’s taking part in his first Gamecamp in Lille, where he’ll be able to talk face-to-face. Séverin describes himself as “a kid who makes games”. Most of the people he meets in the JV world are either hobbyists or businessmen who have companies that create video games, whereas he is a game designer who is obliged to have a company. If he could free himself from this legal status, he would do so with pleasure, because he only wants to make games, the rest is just superfluous. As a result, he doesn’t always find his way into conversations; he’d rather talk about GD than subsidies. What doesn’t attract him to the entrepreneurial side of things is the perpetual growth of the good old capitalist system. He’s doing very well at his level, he doesn’t see the point of doing more. He doesn’t believe in virtuous growth and intends to remain a small studio. If they were ever to recruit a third person, it would be on the basis of a genuine human and emotional understanding, basically that there would be a desire to work with that person and not a need for a more substantial project. As far as trainees are concerned, if he takes them on, it’s above all because for him it’s important to pass on knowledge and to make games intelligently and not just for the fun of making JVs. He doesn’t want any employees, just associates and a bit of consulting, among his acquaintances, to help out on an ad hoc basis. In short, if he could get rid of the paperwork, he’d be happy to do it, but the fact that there are two of them means that they have to have a clear status.
The question of the end
We’ve now come to the end of our two-hour chat, and the fateful question: “If you had to recommend one game, which would it be? The game that turned him around when he first discovered it was Dark Souls, not least because of all the secrets that had to be unravelled, some of which we’re still discovering long after the game’s release. At the time, it was a slap in the face of difficulty, a game that challenged you. As a developer, Séverin was always careful to moderate the effort he asked of players, and the tolerance Dark Soul demanded was truly unheard of at the time, and not just in terms of difficulty. The save management with the campfires, which can force you to restart several dozen minutes of gameplay without any remorse on the part of the developers. It’s a trend we’ll see later in games like Béton Brutal and Getting Over It, but it doesn’t affect as many people. FromSoftware has found a recipe that draws the masses into a challenging style of gameplay. This alchemy unleashes passions with a subtle cocktail of challenge, atmosphere and lore that encourages perseverance. What fascinated Séverin is the fact that the unbearable becomes a challenge that you won’t let go of until you’ve overcome it, which sometimes requires several hundred attempts over many hours – he didn’t let go of his PC for a week. He still has in his mind the image of the exact location of his office, with the ashtray barfing and the windows closed, during the sixty hours it took him to get to the end of the adventure. Souls is first and foremost a battle against oneself, learning patterns and acquiring reflexes; defeat is often the player’s fault, not the game’s. It’s an experiment in surpassing oneself through the screen. When Dark Souls arrived, it offered a new way of looking at video games and, in a way, it’s now the independent game that’s taken up the torch, with a pool of developers constantly striving to offer new experiences to the demanding gamers that we are
We’ve now come to the end of our two-hour chat, and the fateful question: “If you had to recommend one game, which would it be? The game that turned him around when he first discovered it was Dark Souls, not least because of all the secrets that had to be unravelled, some of which we’re still discovering long after the game’s release. At the time, it was a slap in the face of difficulty, a game that challenged you. As a developer, Séverin was always careful to moderate the effort he asked of players, and the tolerance Dark Soul demanded was truly unheard of at the time, and not just in terms of difficulty. The save management with the campfires, which can force you to restart several dozen minutes of gameplay without any remorse on the part of the developers. It’s a trend we’ll see later in games like Béton Brutal and Getting Over It, but it doesn’t affect as many people. FromSoftware has found a recipe that draws the masses into a challenging style of gameplay. This alchemy unleashes passions with a subtle cocktail of challenge, atmosphere and lore that encourages perseverance. What fascinated Séverin is the fact that the unbearable becomes a challenge that you won’t let go of until you’ve overcome it, which sometimes requires several hundred attempts over many hours – he didn’t let go of his PC for a week. He still has in his mind the image of the exact location of his office, with the ashtray barfing and the windows closed, during the sixty hours it took him to get to the end of the adventure. Souls is first and foremost a battle against oneself, learning patterns and acquiring reflexes; defeat is often the player’s fault, not the game’s. It’s an experiment in surpassing oneself through the screen. When Dark Souls arrived, it offered a new way of looking at video games and, in a way, it’s now the independent game that’s taken up the torch, with a pool of developers constantly striving to offer new experiences to the demanding gamers that we are