Friday November 3 was undoubtedly the least noisy day of Paris Games Week. The calm before the storm of the weekend at a show where we know in advance that it will be packed with people. The day of serenity in short and the best time to schedule an interview without having to yell at each other to hear each other. For several years, the “Games Made in France” stand has been gaining in importance and has a small platform in the middle with a live stream on Twitch during which each participant will be able to come and present their game. We arrive at the venue to attend the end of presentation Ebbing by Edouard Caplain, for which a small crowd gathered. The artistic director could not be happier to meet the players to a point where we almost feel guilty for coming to force him to join Sofiane Saheb and myself. Time to start our recorder, and we’re off.
Can one of you tell us about the genesis of the project?
Edouard Caplain: We started in 2020 at the time of Covid, management asked us to propose a new project and they were very, very broad on the mandate. They gave us a number of hours, a budget and then it had to remain a Don’t Nod game in its narrative approach, but the mandate remained so open. For our part, we were coming out of Life is Stange 2, some had also worked on Life is Strange, and we wanted to move away from it by taking advantage of this generous mandate to make a game that was much more focused on gameplay. We proposed to the management a game that was narrative, but which was more focused on this aspect, and the management followed us throughout the production.
Was it decided from the start that Jusant would be a game with a silent narrative?
Edouard Caplain: Almost. From the start, we said to ourselves that we didn’t want to make a Life is Strange, with lots of cutscenes, dialogues, etc. and we started with a game much more focused on titles like Journey, which tell a lot of things without words. It was an inspiration and for us a desire to concentrate the narrative part on everything we knew how to do other than the dialogues, including environmental narration using shells for example.
Sofiane Saheb: We see our narrative DNA shine through in Ebbing. For example, the sequence in Life is Strange where Max plays the guitar is very similar to what you can experience with the shells, where you actively listen. We wanted to challenge ourselves creatively and do something different, especially with this small project and a small team of around forty people at peak production.
With climbing as the main concept, did it shake up the game design in the sense that we imagine a progression that is necessarily more vertical than in other games?
Sofiane Saheb: Completely, since the games we made before were in an already known universe and there, the paradigm has completely changed. We were on a vertical paradigm, we had to review our way of designing levels while creating our gameplay mechanics and it was once again a new challenge to create something that is not experienced horizontally, but the vertical.
Edouard Caplain: Just from an engine point of view it changes everything. The Unreal engine we use is designed to be very horizontal, since that is the line of movement in most games. There, to make a game that goes up in height, it was something new for the studio and from a pure technical point of view, it was not easy to make these very very high spaces. It was a complete change in production mode that we had while the climbing game was a completely new concept for us. When you add the fact that it’s on a huge tower…
Sofiane Saheb: The viewing distance, when we are in a horizontal environment with houses, we can make culling, hiding objects behind others to optimize. For Ebbingwe have a completely open universe in which you have to be able to look up and down, so that was also a challenge.
Edouard Caplain: What we did before in Life is Strange, is that we had a game universe with a background, a setting in which we are not going to go. Something that we had from the start which was as much a desire as a constraint, was to see very far where you were going, to show you where you should go and to advance step by step without loading until then down. It was something pretty new for us and you had to be able to go to that point, be able to turn around and look down and say, “Oh, I was there before and I did everything this path”, which is regularly done in open worlds, but we were on our scale at a level of detail which was to the nearest meter and it was not easy.
Sofiane Saheb: In terms of level design, what we tried to do and it shows a lot in the introduction, is that we finish the cinematic at the start of the game, we are shown the objective without telling us. We will sometimes lose sight of this little lighthouse, enter the small recesses of the tower, and discover new visual details which take us towards our objective and our ascent with this objective which we will lose, then revisit to indicate that we are on the right track without giving the slightest very visible indication. The artistic team strived to never have a marked path that would allow, just by observation, to see where we will have shots or not. When you climb and look up, you see your next shots and I think we succeeded with the art department. I hope so, anyway. laughter
Aside from Journey, what were your broader visual and artistic influences?
Edouard Caplain: We watched a lot of what Inside did. What I liked about it was that it was a very simplified game in terms of visuals and it’s not for kids. This can be seen when we stylize a game through simplification, we can have the feeling that it will be aimed at a very young audience, but what Inside has done and which is very strong for me, is that the gameplay shows us what we can and can’t do without being full of details and that’s kind of the approach we took. We had to know where to put these details, without putting them everywhere, otherwise you think you can climb everywhere, which is annoying. It was one of my references, because if they succeeded, we could too, even if it wasn’t the same camera view. Inside and Journey are my references for simplified and stylized games with a meditative side.
Sofiane Saheb: For my part, it was especially Grow Home from Ubisoft and Death Stranding, where the heart of the gameplay is walking, which was something evocative and we wanted to do the same thing with climbing. “La Horde du Contrevent” by Alain Damasio which I really like (speaking to Edouard) that you haven’t read and that you need to read.
Edouard Caplain: He’s a Damasio shareholder! (both laugh)
Sofiane Saheb: This always very raw fight of the horde against nature, it inspires me even if we wanted to do something more peaceful and that’s why there is no death in Ebbing. If there was death in our game, it would be difficult to say that we are reconnecting with nature, which would be seen more as an enemy than as something that accompanies us.
Have you analyzed climbing games like Insurmountable or The Climb?
Edouard Caplain : Not really for the gameplay. We watched The Climb with the visual team to see how they showed the holds, the places you could put your hands. I haven’t played it and I’ve watched a lot of videos because ultimately we’re further away from what they do and their search for realism. They have very detailed walls that they hollowed out in places to put the sockets. It works in this realistic framework with defined tracks whereas we had a more natural approach, without tracks and with more freedom.
Sofiane Saheb : In reality, we quickly found the positioning we wanted to have for the gameplay. We saw all the games that were on the market, notably the Assassin’s Creed which were quite easy to handle and on the contrary, we had QWOP and we wanted to find a happy medium that wasn’t totally automated, but required a certain skill in the gameplay, something physical that made us go on this system with both triggers. Afterwards, we made other prototypes and we even had one that we have since deleted which was very interesting to make. We had a prototype where we had two hands and two legs, and in a universe with a gigantic tower to climb, and this prototype showed us that it was too slow. We couldn’t level up quickly and if we had kept these mechanics, the game would have taken fifteen hours to finish.
Was it playable despite everything?
Sofiane Saheb: We tried to test, but we quickly realized that it was not the target of the mandate, nor that of the chill side that we wanted to give it. We very quickly returned to the two-handed version, while adding the rope, the harness, the carabiners which are an integral part of the gameplay.
Edouard Caplain: Visually, it was also very weird because you could put your foot wherever you wanted and you found yourself in improbable positions.
Sofiane Saheb: In this prototype, I remember that you had to place your leg higher than your pelvis, then you placed your hand and suddenly you covered ten meters in a minute. both laugh
There’s something quite raw and natural about the gameplay; no super powers or things like that. Was it complicated to find the balance between pure climbing and fantastic elements?
Sofiane Saheb: Not really, because our basic premise remained that we were in a fantastic universe. We find familiar objects in our environmental narrative, like coffee cups or swings for example. From our point of view, it was quite simple for the creation and narration of the universe to imagine that the fauna and flora were totally different from those of our world and that we could create gameplay bricks that came add to the core gameplay which remained quite immobile. Finally, I want to say that we quickly settled on these basic tools and it is the fauna, flora and weather which comes to titillate the player in a fairly natural way.
Edouard Caplain: Creating a world in another galaxy allows you to create a universe with an element of realism in climbing, with a gravity similar to that which we know and gives a legitimate interest to climbing, but on the other hand you do this that you want with everything else. All the objects went through the concept artists to be transformed so that these everyday objects are the same, but different and a coffee machine does not look like ours. The scales and objects required remain similar, but we still have to understand very well that we are not on Earth. This mix allows us to do what we want and justify many things.