The Path

We are Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn. We are the designers and directors of The Path. But we have also modeled and programmed most of it. The character animations are by Laura Raines Smith, the music by Jarboe and the sound design by Kris Force.

We had been developing web sites and internet art projects before – as Entropy8Zuper! - and we needed a technology that would help us achieve our artistic goals better than web technologies could. So, you could say that the flame was already there. We just chose to develop games because they burn better.

The simple fact that we make artistic game for small budgets. We never chose to be indie. We became indie because we failed at being anything else.

Very loosely as somebody who thinks of making games first and making money second (or later, or not at all). I don't think the old distinction of whether or not a game's production is supported by a publisher or other third party still applies, if only because we are seeing more and more of this happening. Being independent has become an attitude. It's a matter of priorities more than of facts.

We are looking forward to the day when games will be made by more artists! Let's hope that the engineers can soon start concentrating on what they are good at and leave the artistic work to the artists.

There are many things we value in games as a form of entertainment. But for us, the most important one is probably the intimacy that is involved in the experience of games. The situation of one game and one player in the privacy of their own home, allows for experiences that cannot be found in any other medium.

We had entered our multiplayer game The Endless Forest last year, in the IGF as well as in Ars Electronica. It got rejected in both. This year we decided to skip Ars Electronica but we did our best to finish a demo in time for the IGF. The deadline coincided with our schedule and we thought entering could only help spreading the word. And it did: it's cheaper advertising than Google Adwords! ;) We didn't think The Path had any chance of being selected, especially after seeing the list of judges which contains very few women and mostly people who are really into pure gaming. And we're still amazed to see The Path among the other games in the selection.

The basic concept of a horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood came from when we were making a dreamy game about Sleeping Beauty. It was simply a variation on that concept.

We have always liked working with old texts (mythologies, legends, religious texts, folklore, etc), even before we were making games. Fairy tales are fascinating in particular because they come from an oral history. We like to think that digital connectedness is very similar to that pre-print society. It's not so much about the truth of story but about the way it is being told and experienced by every person differently.

In the first prototype, the player had a lot of control over the avatar. But it felt wrong. It was not compatible with our story. It was too much fun. So we removed all the buttons from the screen and added a sense of insecurity about what the characters were going to do.

Not so much frightening as serious. We're dealing with very deep subject matter in The Path. And we felt that the more playful types of interaction were distracting from that content. The gameplay made it possible to just surf through the game without having to contemplate the issues or taste the atmosphere. We didn't want to allow that. We wanted the player to be focused on the story. And the fun gameplay was not supporting the story. It wasn't expressing anything that contributed to the emotional experience that we want people to have.

So far, everything has been going well. We've done lots of things wrong but we don't think they could have been avoided. One thing that was rather stupid, in retrospect, was to completely trust that we were going to find modelers that were simply going to make interpretations of the characters that fit the game perfectly. That didn't work out at all.

We lost a lot of time looking for the right person and ended up doing the modeling ourselves.

But the game is far from finished, so there's lots more opportunity for doing things wrong.

Well, the team is mostly just us two, so we'd say: Love helps. Love for the project, love for each other.

The Path started rather slowly. From concept to the current demo, it took about a year. And we need another year to finish it. Not fulltime, though. We reserve time to work on other projects and take care of marketing during production. We have found that it's better for the quality of the project when we don't obsess over it all the time.

We made the game with Quest3D. Blender was used for modeling, 3D Studio Max for animation, instruments (both analog and digital) + one very real voice for the music; Photoshop, Painter and ZBrush for textures. We shared code via a Subversion repository and Tortoise clients.

It was very good for us to have Jarboe's music quite early in the process. That really helped fine tune the design to match the atmosphere created by the sound.

We hope playing The Path will be fun the way in which reading a poem, looking at a painting or walking through interesting architecture can be fun. So it's more about deep joy than frivolous fun for us.

It's about navigating through the narrative environment and finding elements that help you construct the story. Feeling how everything fits together so well and how it really says something about your own life, about human existence, and your place in the cosmos.

The Path is not candy, not fast food. You won't want to play it all the time. It's too deep. Too heavy. It's a special thing. We want our games to become part of people's lives, and not to replace them. To continue inspiring thoughts even when they are not playing. We want them to be precious.

Next, we're going to finish The Path and launch it. But while we are working on that, we'll make another game, a small but deep one. And continue playing with The Endless Forest, of course.