In the orbit of MIO: immersion at Douze Dixièmes

A few weeks ago, I stepped through the doors of the Douze Dixièmes studio, tucked away in a quiet corner of the capital. For several years, the team has been refining an ambitious project: MIO: Memories in Orbit, a Metroidvania game with striking art direction, challenging gameplay, and, above all, powered by a proprietary game engine. During a visit to their offices, we had the opportunity to talk at length with Sarah Hourcade, the studio’s producer, and Oscar Blumberg, the game’s designer. It was a chance to revisit the technical foundations, artistic choices, and design philosophy behind MIO.

The legacy of Shady Part of Me

To understand MIO, we first need to go back to their previous project: Shady Part of Me, a 2.5D narrative puzzle game. While the game was a critical success, it also left behind a need for something new. “Playing the same puzzle game for four years wears you out,” Sarah confides. This fatigue directly influenced the shift towards a larger, more dynamic project with a renewed sense of gameplay enjoyment on a daily basis. The need for change was also felt on a technical level: “We redid almost everything, even the engine.”

Rather than relying on an existing engine such as Unity or Unreal, the studio decided to develop its own technical tool from the outset in 2017. At the time, this decision was primarily motivated by a desire to cater to the team’s specific passions: “We had two developers who were fundamentally interested in making a game engine. So we did it.” The result was an engine initially designed for their first game, Shady Part of Me, which focused on light and shadows.

But when MIO began to take shape, the need for a more flexible tool suited to a Metroidvania game became apparent. The Shady engine wasn’t designed to handle the scale of the new project, nor to support the platforming and semi-open world exploration mechanics. So the team rebuilt the technical foundation almost entirely from scratch. “We kept less than 20% of the original code,” says Sarah. The editor, the physics engine, the rendering engine: everything was rebuilt. Today’s engine is designed for the specific needs of MIO, with an emphasis on fluidity, platforms, and a high degree of internal iteration freedom.

A playful shift: from contemplation to challenge

With Shady Part of Me, Douze Dixièmes offered a narrative and introspective experience that was linear and puzzle-based. With MIO, the studio is making a clear shift towards a more interactive, open, and challenging game. This transition, far from insignificant, is seen as an organic reaction to the previous project. “I spent four years making a puzzle game. You know all the puzzles, you know all the solutions… you end up not having fun anymore. Now, with MIO, even after hundreds of hours of testing, I’m not bored,” says Sarah. Ideas emerge from desires, momentary influences, and a desire to please oneself and the team. “There’s a real emotional dimension to the way we work.” They mention Sekiro, Ori, and Hollow Knight as games that have left their mark on them, but always reworked in their own way.

The gaming experience is designed to be rich, with evolving platforming mechanics, open areas, and exploration. The game gradually becomes more complex, especially halfway through, and is based on a design that aims to be fair rather than difficult. “We know we’re going to lose people halfway through, but we want those who stay to be truly engaged. “

MIO isn’t an easy game, but it’s not cruel. The difficulty increases gradually, with mechanics that become more sophisticated over time. Death isn’t punitive: it serves the gameplay and even the narrative. The pearls that the player loses become a resource for reviving Chi, a central character in the hub. ”That idea came very late in the process. It became a gentle way to help the player progress.“

The game becomes more demanding in the second half, which is more difficult and more technical. But the team is careful to keep it fair: the main path remains accessible, even if some of the secondary content deliberately flirts with being ”odious” (that’s Sarah’s word, not mine!).

And then there’s the exploration. The studio claims that over 35% of the game is optional, dedicated to the story, the lore, and the desire to explore. “We didn’t want to hold the player’s hand. But we also didn’t want them to feel lost.” It’s a delicate balance. So much so that the map itself went through countless iterations. For a while, you even had to “repair” it yourself, like in a reverse Nier: Automata.

Colors, watercolors, and science fiction

Visually, MIO also stands out from Shady. Where the former adopted a limited palette and muted tones, the latter embraces color. The studio wanted to create a hand-painted, more dynamic, and livelier sci-fi world. The result is a colorful but strange universe populated by robots with organic bodies, cyclopean structures, and non-anthropomorphic creatures that sometimes evoke insects or raw biology. This world, built from an aesthetic reminiscent of the heyday of Métal Hurlant, is also organized around strong themes. The relationship to the body, to machines, to breath, and to blood runs through the entire artistic direction. The game’s biomes evoke both entrails and mechanical organs, making the ship an entity to be explored as much as a body to inhabit.

At Douze Dixièmes, particular attention is paid to game feel and player progression. From the outset, players are invited to navigate without a map, memorize locations, and find their way using spatial logic and environment recognition. Far from being punitive, this choice is a conscious rejection of linearity. “We want players to explore, test, and search without feeling lost. ” This approach requires meticulous environmental design work. The team talks about countless iterations on areas, connections, and shortcuts. This is all the more true given that nearly 35% of the game is entirely optional. This secondary surface allows the lore to be fleshed out and additional challenges to be offered.

The death system in MIO is also the result of a long process of iteration. Rather than punishing the player harshly, the game recycles lost resources, pearls, in an evolution system in the central hub. The mechanics are simple: the more you die, the more the pearl fountain fills up, gradually awakening the character Chi and changing the world around you. This choice, which came late in production, is an elegant response to the issue of frustration. “The frustration of losing pearls is offset by the fact that it advances something in the game.” It’s a cycle, a slow but tangible transformation that reinforces the organic nature of the universe.

One detail that speaks volumes about the studio’s mindset: the presence of a timer in the demo wasn’t planned at first. It was during internal QA sessions that the team noticed an informal competition emerging around speedrunning. Rather than discouraging these practices, Douze Dixièmes decided to respond by adding a timer and deliberately leaving a few undocumented shortcuts in the game. These glitches and detours, some of which are the result of uncorrected bugs, allow the most savvy players to save time. It’s a nod to the community and a sign of openness to speedrun enthusiasts.

When asked if there were any technical challenges, Sarah hands over to Oscar, the studio’s game designer. He enters the scene just as we were talking about the game’s themes: science fiction, body-machine, organic textures, non-human forms. “There’s a really strong connection to the body,” he explains. Breath, blood, the heart: these elements permeate the game’s universe, from level design to ship architecture, forming both a narrative and mechanical backbone. “There’s a huge theme around the organic and the robotic,” confirms Oscar. A classic sci-fi theme, yes, but approached here with a unique twist.

Behind the scenes, the team consists of 18 people. At peak production, there were 25, but the organization remains “fairly horizontal”: everyone can have their say on everything. It’s a method that works as long as you accept chaos and endless discussions.

Collective game design, hidden secrets, and lost player enjoyment

Game design at Douze Dixièmes is a team sport. “There’s no game designer whose job it is to do that every day,” jokes Oscar. This approach sometimes results in experiences that are a little clunky, but always full of surprises. They know that their game isn’t for everyone. It requires patience and curiosity. “If you’re patient, you’ll get there in the end. But you have to enjoy immersing yourself in the universe.”

Secrets are scattered everywhere, sometimes in an almost sadistic way, with hidden areas behind invisible walls and bosses buried in unlikely dead ends. “We scare ourselves sometimes,” laughs Oscar. Their hope? That even if only 2% of players find the area, and only 1% beat the boss, those few will be enough to fuel the legend. A walkthrough by one player, a few discussions on a forum… and the team is already jubilant.

The studio doesn’t claim to be reinventing the wheel, except when it’s fun. The game engine was designed in-house, a risky and time-consuming choice, but above all “fun at the start of production.” Everything about their production exudes personal desire and constant experimentation. There is little manual lighting, palettes are limited to three colors per biome, and the graphics are close to illustrations… But this actually hides a mountain of hand-coded scripts and tricks. The look is “weird,” but perfectly intentional.

A sensory maze and invisible structure

In MIO, the tutorial itself is a treasure hunt. There are no direct instructions, just a logic of observation: if the player doesn’t move, the game waits. If they get stuck, help appears. Everything is calibrated, but almost invisible. Each platform becomes a test. “Will they figure it out on their own?” the game seems to ask silently. It’s a subtle balance between freedom and a safety net, designed to never break the immersion, but always to guide the player.

And behind this false simplicity, the setting is deceiving. One of the studio’s most unusual choices is technical: the game has no “levels” in the traditional sense. There is a single world, a gigantic, unbroken level that loads dynamically as the player progresses. This is a heavy technical constraint, but one that ultimately shaped a design philosophy: the world must be real, tangible, connected. While this structure complicates editing and backtracking, it also fosters a unique spatial coherence.

One of the areas in the game is called Metropolis. The name evokes Fritz Lang or Osamu Tezuka’s manga, but it only came about after the area’s visual design was complete. “It’s more of a melting pot than a deliberate reference,” explains Oscar. Inspirations blend together, and the look evolves as development progresses. Sometimes, an entire room remains just because no one has deleted it. The studio, made up mostly of junior staff, cultivates this naivety as a strength. “Senior staff would find us disorganized,” admits Oscar with a laugh. But this apparent disorganization doesn’t prevent them from achieving their goals. The game is coming along. The engine is working. The universe seems incredible. And it’s often through improvisation that they find their tone.

This continuous architecture generates unexpected collateral effects. Need a new path? We dig. A room that’s blocked? We break through it. Each adjustment is a graft, each connection a point of tension. But this controlled chaos fits perfectly with the aesthetic of MIO. The universe, an abandoned ship, seems in ruins, and this ruin becomes the ideal canvas to justify construction accidents. “Happy accidents,” as they call them. Areas that have fallen on top of each other, forgotten pipes that lead to secrets.

This approach also creates areas that are less easy to navigate. “There are places in the game where, in terms of navigation, we’re not entirely satisfied.” But these imperfections become almost coherent. It’s an old ship, ravaged by time. The irregularity makes sense. And even if not everyone immediately realizes that this is a spaceship, the information is there, scattered throughout, often in forgotten datapads or fleeting glimpses of space.

No twists, just mastery

In terms of gameplay, MIO isn’t trying to revolutionize anything. And it’s not trying to. “There are no gameplay twists,” admits Oscar. And that’s okay. The studio’s ambition lies elsewhere: in rigor, clarity, and a sense of mastery. At the end of the game, players should be able to say, “I know this character inside out.”

The build system, for example, is deliberately lightweight. Those who are interested can optimize and create synergies. But no one will be punished for not doing so. The most important thing is mastering the fundamentals: jumping, dashing, and fighting. This design choice is rooted in their personal tastes, but also in their vision of the medium.

The story, meanwhile, takes a back seat. The major events have already taken place. The present is a field of ruins, a space to search, fill in the gaps, and interpret. The narrative is embedded in the environment, the settings, and the details. There are no explanatory cutscenes or internal monologues. The studio claims to have created a “bulletproof” narrative structure: everything has meaning, everything has been thought out. But little is explicitly stated. As a result, each player perceives a different version. Some miss the point entirely. Others guess at family ties between characters based on a visual detail or a buried line of dialogue. “There are things we don’t say anywhere, but we have an answer for everything. We’ll see if people enjoy looking for them.” It’s not a lore to be collected, but a world to be felt. A ship, a story, a fall. It’s up to each player to decide whether they want to fill in the silences.