Exclusive: Initiation, the quest to make indie developers great again

Indie games are probably the fastest growing market in gaming right now, but great indie games that tell a gripping story are few and far between. That's something that two friends from France are planning to change.

In the French region Centre-Val de Loire, home for the Loire Valley known for its many vineyards, orchards, and asparagus fields which lines the river banks. A region known as the Cradle of  the French and the Garden of France, home to Orléans with the beautiful Rue Jeanne d'Arc and the Saint-Croix Cathedral. In this very region is a town called Châteauroux, a town of approximately 45,000 people where nothing really happens, a town which is probably mostly famous for a small indie studio which was formed about six months ago.

This isn't some kind of fake indie developer where they have a whole big crew with guys that have been in the industry for 20+ years. They aren't getting cash from any other big companies like Ori and the blind Forrest, Unravel, or Fe where they call themselves indie game and developers while getting their pockets filled with money from big developers like EA and Microsoft.

These guys are making their own video reader software because they are too poor to buy the licensed software, they are even having to learn how to sew underpants back together because spending money on that will hinder the game development.

These two friends, two real indie game developers sitting in a living room trying their best to make their dream become reality.

Atle: I am Atle Williatham, writer for GameZone, and you are?

Alex: So I am Alex and I will probably be the one talking now and with me is my friend, Thibault, he's the one doing the drawings and doing all the animations. He's just listening, probably won't talk a lot.

Atle: We'll start with a very basic question: who are you guys and what are you working on?

Alex: So we are two guys, two friends, working on a project called Initiation, it's a 2D platformer. I (Alex) am the one programming using Unity to put all the parts together and my friend here does all the animations and drawings.

Atle: How long have you guys been in the "industry"?

Alex: Hmm, something about six months so we have never really worked on a game like this before.

Atle: So you guys just started? You haven't been in any other studios, worked on other games? This is the first time you're trying to make a game?

Alex: Yea, I was working as a programmer before, but never on game.

Atle: The game you're working called Initiation, what can you tell us about it, what's it about?

Alex: That is a long question. Without spoiling anything, let's say it's something that I had in my head for more than five years now and I've decided a few months ago to put it on paper and give it to my friend, he read it and he thought the story was good.

[Initiation] is something in the middle. It's not depression, but when you are in a place where you're not supposed to be,  but you are telling yourself that you should be there because that's what you know and that's what you want to continue to live because that's easier when you are not good than trying to change who you are.

It's about a character who is in a place like this and he does not want to go somewhere else. The player has to take this character and move it around and force him to go somewhere where he don't want to go.

Atle: So you could say that Initiation is about the struggles of life?

Alex: Yea, something like that.

Atle: Good indie games like Limbo and Braid all have something special to them, some features to set them aside from other games, what does Initiation have?

Alex: Well, um, in terms of gameplay we don't really have anything out of the ordinary right now, what we have is something really simple, you just jump, move around and some interactions. The really interesting part is that the game will answer to what you do, there's a lot of random stuff that will happen. If you try and play with the game, the game will play with you as much as it can.

The idea is to get the player to try stuff out to see how the game is going to answer. It's a complex story, so a lot of people are going be trying stuff to get out of the zone, trying to move the story as they want and the game is supposed to answer as much as it can to every kind of player. So the point is not to add physics gameplay or something like that, the game is going to be answering people.

Atle: What will the main focus of Initiation be? Will it be gameplay? A gripping story? Music?

Alex: So music is really, really, really important. The point is to make the player feel what the character is feeling so music, like in Journey for example, is going to be really, really, really important. We are working with musicians and people on that. We have taken hours upon hours to listen to free music to find something that is exactly what we want to tell the player. So there is going to be a sort of mix between making the character as expressive as we could, while having the music make the player feel what the character is feeling.

Atle: So the music will push the story forward?

Alex: Yea, exactly.

Atle: What are the biggest struggles you have faced developing Initiation? And are those issues directly related to being an independent developer?

Alex: Well, we haven't tried to sell it yet so we haven't struggled with that, but we didn't know anything about game development. I am a programmer myself, so i know some basics, but it's really hard to approach this kind of [project].

For example, I uploaded on Facebook, not that long ago, a video of our first animation. So we started with a sprite animation, drawing each sprite by hand before discovering that you can do some kind of bone animation and when we discovered that we were like "that was a really stupid idea to try and make it like Mario or something like that, nobody does that anymore". So, we struggle with our lack of knowledge, but we are learning pretty fast and we have people coming to us and saying "that's pretty good result for two people who don't know anything about games." We are working a lot and trying to understand but we're struggling because each task is something we don't know, each task is something we have to learn. That's our struggle.

Atle: Have you noticed if and how the indie scene has changed and will you guys try and change the indie scene somehow, for better or for worse?

Alex: (laugh) The problem now, like we talked about before, is that if you see the Kickstarter projects that make lots and lots of money are big teams with guys in their 40s that have worked in the industry for years. We show up, two guys, I'm 23 and my friend is 27, and we have never worked with [games].

We are trying to make a living in a world where indie games are not really indie projects, like Ori And The Blind Forest. Everyone says that's an indie game but when you look there's a lot of producers and I think that Bungie or Microsoft, something like that, was giving them a lot of money, so that's not an indie game in a really strict sense. It's something troubling me because we are fighting saying "I'm an indie game" while you see big teams saying "I'm an indie game" when they are a part of some big industry so they aren't really an indie game. There's a big problem on the market now because we don't really know what "indie" means anymore.

Atle: Yea, the term has changed a lot, but you guys are like the two friends sitting in a garage in the 80s making their first games while competing with EA and all of them trying to say that they are indie games.

Alex: Yes, that us. We're in the middle of a town where nothing happens, so that's really fun, we're not in a garage, we're working from my living room, we're going back to basics.

Atle: What are your goals for Initiation, do have any goals set or are you guys just releasing the game and hoping for the best?

Alex: The beta is coming soon, we're working on it. If everything is working as expected it will be in three to four weeks. After that, we are going to see what people think about it and obviously from there we will see where we are going.

Atle: So the beta will be the big decider on what you do with Initiation?

Alex: Yes.

Atle: From what I've seen from the videos and screenshots, Initiation looks like an interesting game. When will this be available for the public to buy and not just play a beta, or have you even planned about that?

Alex: Honestly, we were thinking about it, but we have no plan because we don't even know if this is going work. This is, in some ways, not really a game you will see everyday on the market. There are a lot of rpg/ simulation/ survival etc. but there are not a lot of story rich games, like we are trying to make a living out of. So we'll see, we'll see from there, if people like it we will try to do our best to make it, to finish it, even if we have to remove a small part of the game, but if people are really into it, yea we will go as fast as we can as far as we can.

Atle: You are making this for PC, right, not for any consoles?

Alex: Yes, PC first and if people like it then maybe we'll bring it to iPhone and Android, but PC first.

Atle:  A last question: what was the inspiration to make Initiation? Did you take any inspiration from any other games, real life events, or anything like that?

Alex: A lot of people told me that it looks like Limbo, and that's funny because I wrote this story five years ago and I think I played Limbo the summer after that, so I had never seen Limbo before writing this story. But obviously what's in the game has been part of my experiences in video games. There is a lot of [inspiration from], for me, from Abe, Abe's Odyssey, it's an old game where you could go in the background, foreground, etc. etc. Limbo, not that much actually, even if we looked at it a lot to see how the character is moving, because that's a really pleasant game to play, and we are trying to make it look like it when you move. If you can move like Limbo you're going have a game that is pleasant to play, but there's not a lot of games that inspired us directly.

Atle: Okay, so it's a truly unique project since everyone is comparing it to Limbo, but you made the story before Limbo.

Alex: Oh yea, in the story there is nothing inspired from nothing, in the gameplay and in the visuals maybe it has been inspired from what I've seen lately, Limbo, maybe a little bit of Ori, that's pretty much it, we've not been that much inspired [by other games].

Atle: Interesting. Unless you have anything more to add to make people more excited about Initiation then I think we're done for this time.

Alex: The best way to be excited is to check our Facebook and Twitter, we post a little bit more information every day of how the development is going and how the story will be. For example, I think it was yesterday (July 5th) I posted a video of orbs on Facebook and that was a pretty big spoiler. That's the best way to be excited about our game.

Atle: Alright, take care and good luck with your game!

Alex: Thank you and good bye.

If a story driven indie game made by two French dudes sounds like something worth supporting then maybe head over to their Facebook or Twitter and let them know, because if no one is interested then there won't be a game for the rest of us to enjoy. After all, it's not every day we get the chance to follow game development this closely.

I, for one, will whole heartedly support the guys working on Initiation, both because the game looks great and because these types of developers have almost died in the industry and the death of small two man team developers is NOT what the industry needs.

#MakeIndieGamesGreatAgain