Texa, creator of The Mute House
The Mute House is one of a number of recent horror games that proudly follow in the footsteps of the genre’s 90s tenors. With Texa, the game’s creator, we take a look back at his career, and what led him to develop this title where fixed cameras and twisting puzzles take center stage.
PnT: Hello Texa, and thank you for this interview. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got involved in game development in your spare time?
Texa: Remember Dreams? The creative game that unfortunately went a bit haywire on Ps4. In 2020, during the lockdown, I spent some time on it, tinkering with little things. There were lots of Dreams versions of well-known licenses. Mario in Dreams. Sonic in Dreams. Resident Evil in Dreams. It was fun.
For fun, I started nothing more and nothing less than a little Resident Evil clone under Dreams. You played as a chick in a mansion. There was nothing. No real gameplay. It was just a title, a garden, a big hall, a dining room with a document and a zombie in a corridor. Like a lot of people, I quickly gave up because it wasn’t going anywhere, but I liked the creative process behind this little creation software on consoles.
So I thought it would be nice to take a look at a real game engine, while at the same time thinking that it might be easier to start with something more accessible than Unity or Unreal Engine. So I gave Construct 3 a try. It’s a 2D game engine, with visual scripting programming.
I started trying things out, learning the basics. I had a little project that I liked, but without really realizing it, the idea of doing a Survival Horror had been born in my head and growing since the Dreams chapter. In 2021, the idea turned into a desire. I dropped Construct 3 and installed Unreal Engine 4 after investing in a war PC. I spent a long time learning how to use the software. It’s tedious. Especially when you have to plunge into it in your spare time after coming home from work. After a few months, I started on what would become The Mute House, based on the sketch I’d made for Dreams.
Of course, the project has since evolved. It’s become a real game!
PnT: I’ve been following your project for a number of years, but could you tell us a bit about The Mute House?
Texa: The Mute House is what I’d call a scale-model Survival Horror game. I’ve always thought of the project as a small game. In terms of scope, it’s perhaps closer to a Puppet Combo game than a Tormented Souls. A game that you can throw on quietly one evening and come to the end of it after a few hours. A small game, but a cool one that makes for a great evening.
It’s also, and above all, a love letter to the Survival Horror classics of the 90s/early 2000s.
PnT: Did you want to create a game without knowing the genre, or was it the desire to make a Survival Horror that made you decide to start developing a video game?
Texa: Clearly, I think it was my love for the genre that really pushed me into developing this game. I think that’s the way it is for a lot of gamers when they start creating. They have a favorite genre or game, and they want to reproduce it in some way. Or at least create or recreate something they’ve enjoyed in the past. A game they would have liked to play.
PnT: Was there ever a time when you thought you were going to call it a day?
Texa: Not since I started The Mute House. I’ve come up against reality several times. The main obstacles are the budget and the time allocated to development.
Game creation is not my job. I was a laborer when I started. I’d to work in 3×8 and try to familiarize myself with Unreal Engine on the way home. Today, I work nights elsewhere, but game development takes up a lot of my free time and a bit of my salary. It’s an investment, in every sense of the word.
Besides, there were times when I didn’t feel motivated and made little progress on the project. But the idea of calling it quits never crossed my mind. For me it was more like, “It’ll take as long as it takes, but it’ll go all the way.”
I’m happy because I’m nearing the end of development, so I stuck to it. Looking back, I think the fact that it was a project I did on my own time helped in the end. I had the advantage of being able to get on with it whenever I wanted. I didn’t feel I had to.
It’s also how I came to realize that inspiration doesn’t come by magic, but that it’s up to me to nurture it. There’s a tendency to think that you have to be in the right “mood”, that you have to be inspired first, and then move on to the creative process. To take action. But it’s the other way around. It’s when you take action that inspiration comes to you. You huff and puff, you’re lazy, then you get down to it and it’s like gardening. You plant things without really knowing what you’re doing, and then you watch what happens. Oh, it grows! It makes you feel euphoric and makes you want to pick up the seeds and plant even more things, and your garden takes shape!
PnT: Why did you choose Survival Horror as your first game? It’s pretty easy to create technically, but it’s also a real work of art. Does that worry you or motivate you?
Texa: Towards old-school Survival Horror, to be precise. Survival horror is a genre that has evolved a lot. What I wanted was to get back to the basics of the genre. Because, quite simply, I love it. I’m fascinated by this type of level design. By this simple gameplay loop. By these atmospheres. By the fixed camera angles, with the aesthetic and cinematographic aspect they bring.
For an independent game, it’s also simpler, I think. The fixed camera point of view means you can concentrate on what you do or don’t want to show the player. Hiding naughty things off-camera and so on.
We can also afford to do things that would be much more unsightly in a shoulder-mounted game. Animations, for example, which, while correct in fixed camera, would look much messier with the camera glued to the model. But there are disadvantages too. Typically, it’s harder to manage the action with this type of camera, and you come up against a number of limitations.
Personally, I love working on the composition of camera shots. Thinking about what I’m going to put in the background, how I’m going to light a scene, what I’m going to leave in the dark and so on. It’s almost like photography after all.
PnT: Did you try to put together a team as the game grew? I’m thinking in particular of the music and sound design, which are sometimes jobs in their own right.
Texa: I’ve always wanted to keep the project as human-scale as possible. It’s an amateur game, I’m not a professional. When I started, I didn’t really know where I was going. I just wanted to make a game in my spare time, so I always tried not to do too much.
That said, from the outset I knew that certain elements would be impossible to do myself, but that’s part of the process. As you point out, I knew, for example, that I’d have to go through a composer for the musical part.
PnT: Have you tried to find a publisher to publish your game, or is it because you want to remain 100% independent?
Texa: Never. The game started out as a very small project, and I want it to end that way. So, yes, it does pose even greater budgetary limitations, but it’s a choice. In concrete terms, the game is financed out of my own pocket with the equivalent of two and a half minimum wages. That’s just the way it is.
There’s also the question of crowndfunding. There are lots of great games that have been financed this way, but I don’t know, I never wanted to ask for money for the development of the game. And especially not from players for a first game.
The only people I applied to were Epic for a little financial help, which was refused. It would have been very useful and would have allowed me to do a lot of things I had in mind but which I finally had to abandon. I could have got stuck on that, but never mind, I dealt with it.
PnT: The comparison with the first Resident Evil opuses is quite obvious. Is this something that can sometimes get in the way of your creative process, or is the fact that you’ve been exposed to such models a strength?
Texa: That could create a roadblock, but no. I have no problem with my game being seen as a “Resident Evil at home”. I don’t hide my inspirations, that would be stupid. They’re visible, and that’s a strength. That’s what pushed me to do the project. It’s then up to me to make sure that the game has its own identity despite that.
PnT: And how did you manage the balance between inspiration and original ideas?
Texa: It’s hard to say, it’s something you learn as you go along. At first, you do something very similar, then ideas come to you and you think “Why not do it differently? Little changes that make it your own game. Things that can’t be done in a Triple A because the players would get upset.
PnT: Were there any moments or passages that you reworked because they were too close to your inspirations?
Texa: Game elements, yes. For example, the Resident Evil storage chest system, which I’m taking over. Initially, they had thought of making this system, but without linking the chests together. In other words, each chest had its own inventory. The idea is cool, but it would have been really unbearable considering the size of the Spencer mansion.
I went back to this initial idea, for the completely opposite reason. As my playing area is smaller, I’ve made each storage unit independent. This pushes management a little further without becoming irritating because The Mute House’s Foley Manor is smaller.
PnT: Apart from the license created by Shinji Mikami, do you have any other models, even beyond video games?
Texa: Alone in the Dark. The first, by Frédérick Raynal. This game fascinates me. It’s a game that would be impossible to make today, it’s too perched, too complicated.
Basically, what I was doing was closer to the latter. I wanted a fairly frustrating game, with no real staging, just one very stoic character and no dialogue. (In AitD, dubbing is only done for documents.)Just, you’re in a big haunted house, you visit dangerous places, you have monsters and puzzles. That’s the game. Eventually it evolved and I moved away from it a bit.
Obscure too. I love Obscure.It’s one of my inspirations, especially for the introduction to the game.
I could also mention “Cool air”, which was a source of inspiration. It’s an unfairly overlooked Lovecraft short story.Possibly my favorite. You can feel the places described through the words, as if they were materializing in front of you. I recommend it, it’s short but devilishly effective.
PnT: By the way, do you prefer Mikami or Kamiya?
Texa: These are two great names. I have a few problems with people’s vision of Mikami, to whom I find a bit of everything. But there have been so many superb ideas from other people, especially in the first RE, which is incredibly masterful. He’s still a great game director and an excellent creator, but I prefer Kamiya. If only because he’s a loudmouth and has no problem with offending people in his comments. He makes me laugh and reminds me a little of Masahiro Ito in his frankness.
PnT: It’s an element of game design that often comes up in discussions between survival horror fans, but why do you think fixed camera shots are so popular and relevant to the genre?
Texa: The real answer is nostalgia. But there’s something else too. It allows you to have fun with camera shots, to convey emotions, to be aesthetically pleasing. As I said earlier, it’s almost photography. Some of the camera shots in Resident Evil could be turned into paintings, such is the beauty of their composition.
Tension can be handled differently too. An enemy you can hear but can’t see because he’s off-camera is certainly annoying, but it also scares the hell out of you!
PnT: In The Mute House, you return to the inventory management that has been somewhat lost in recent productions, but you add a very singular touch in the management of chargers. Can you tell us a bit about this and, above all, explain this choice?
Texa: The idea was to make the player worry about his ammunition at all times. In The Mute House, the only way to see how many bullets are left in your gun is to look manually. When the player takes aim, he can look in the magazine of his handgun, which will tell him how much ammunition is left.
All this was done with the intention of keeping the HUD to a minimum. What’s more, ammunition is not stacked in the inventory. In other words, for a pistol magazine, you’ll have 8 bullets. This magazine takes up one inventory slot. Obviously, this has to be balanced with the rest of the game to avoid frustration.
PnT: I’ve noticed that, if you reload your weapon while the magazine in use is not empty, the player will have to pick up the magazine from the floor to recover any ammunition still stored in it before leaving the room. We’re pretty much to the point here. How did you come up with this idea and why?
Texa: Yes, always with the intention of pushing inventory management and encouraging players to be careful with their ammunition. Initially, I wanted to make a non-empty magazine lose all its remaining ammunition. But that didn’t make much sense, so as you can see, I just made the magazine fall out, giving the player the chance to recover it.
I want to encourage the player to count his balls when he’s in action. It’s one of the little things that’s unique to the game. The idea is that what generates an advantage, also generates a counterpart.
This is also the intention of the care system. The main healing items are leeches. They gradually heal Emily, but prevent her from moving properly. The player can no longer run when using one.
PnT: You’ve recently started integrating voice acting. How did you decide to get involved? A chance meeting with an actress?
Texa: As I was saying, I hadn’t originally planned any dubbing at all. The idea of finally including some came up when the game demo was released. I saw a lot of players thinking that Emily wasn’t reacting to anything. So I thought I’d throw in a few sentences, a few thoughts here and there. At first, it was just a dialog box that opened up. Like a comic-book bubble. And here again: Gardening. It happened gradually. I incorporated that, and then I thought, “Why not put Emily in touch with a colleague via her radio?”.
At that point, I realized that the speech bubbles were too amateurish and at odds with the tone of the game and the intention of a clean HUD. The dubbing became obvious. And there you have it, two characters to dub, with little dialogues. I don’t regret it, it’s great. It’s a lot of work, even for the little dubbing there is, but it brings the game to life. I also reworked the game’s introduction accordingly.
PnT: Does implementing a dubbing system when it wasn’t originally planned bring additional difficulties?
Texa: Mainly budgetary. I want to pay as much as I can for the work I do, even if I’m limited. And obviously, the workload gets bigger. It’s a lot more cutting and sound design work.
PnT: In the past, you’ve often taken a stand on the presence of the famous yellow paint as a visual indicator in video games. Why does this annoy you?
Texa: I like to laugh at that, yes. But really it’s not the yellow paint itself that annoys me, it’s the way it’s used.
It’s a reference point for the player, a way of letting him know what he can interact with. That’s normal. However, over time, I get the impression that it’s become a lazy system, and that we’re no longer even trying to do this work in a coherent, immersive way.
I don’t know, there are lots of ways of doing it. A unique graphic element that stands out from the crowd, a different shape, a roughness, a sound element. I still prefer to see a little cursor or icon on the HUD.
Please stop smearing your walls and ladders with yellow paint.
You see, that’s one advantage of fixed cameras. You can focus the player’s attention relatively easily with a well-chosen camera angle.
PnT: What do you think of the rise of the indie scene these days?
Texa: I like the indie scene because it’s, I think, more sincere. Because it’s perhaps less limited by a well-defined market and specifications than the triple-A scene.
I have a weakness for tiny indie games. But really, the VERY SMALL indie games. The games you find in the back of the Steam store. Stuff made out of bricks and mortar that nobody knows about. Games with 15 Steam reviews that were released two years ago. Sometimes completely broken games that nobody wants to play. You wonder who created them. The gameplay is sometimes limited. Sometimes it’s even a bit of a rip-off. But knowing that anyone can plunge into the creation of a game and publish it will always captivate me, because there are also some pleasant surprises in the mix.
PnT: What do you wish for the JV industry?
Texa: This concerns the triple-A industry in particular, but perhaps it would sometimes be better to scale back its ambitions.
Games are becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming to produce, especially with Open World games lasting dozens or even hundreds of hours. I doubt this model can be sustained for much longer.