J'ai vu le Soleil (I saw the Sun) J'ai vu le Soleil is a first person puzzle and labyrinth game, with a strong anti-consumerism message and a very dark disposition.

Writing

History

From poem to movie, to game

This game was not a game at first, it was a poem. (translation to come)

This at first led to the idea of a short film, with a shadow as a hero, in a metaphorical city, with a fishing boat in the middle of the street... and from there, the idea started to evolve so much, it became a notion, not a story, not a medium, but a feeling of loneliness and abandonment that had to be told.

A game is a game is a game

The moment I started trying to make a game, I tried to create J'ai vu le Soleil. The game, then, was very different, it was only an infinite street, that played with time a little (may be, this will be in the final game, who knows), but it was something far too complex for a first game.

It became a vague idea of a supermarket about a year later, and then, after starting development on the Beta of Cutie, this is starting to take form, shape, and a structure for an actual game... possibly a good one.

The fire crying to know me standing

There are a few events that coincided with my envy for doing this, both as some sort of blog/wiki thing, to help me remember all the ideas, the good, the bad, the ugly; but also, to jump start the process of thinking about actually making this game. Right now, I'm wrapping up coding on Cutie, and the game itself lacks levels but is otherwise mostly good to go. So, as every indy who's ever lived, I'm thinking about totally something else instead of finishing the first game.

Influences

Gameplay

The gameplay is heavily influenced by Amnesia - A Machine for Pigs. I liked the puzzles as well as the mood of the game. I'd like J'ai vu le Soleil to be set in a more modern setting, to be creepy, but with everyday life occurrences and contexts.

There is a good part coming from Everybody's gone to the Rapture especially once you're outside the mall. Its open world carefully crafted for you to follow a specific path.

It's also influence by The Stanley Parable in this that it is a simple gameplay. There is no tedious task to accomplish.

There are a lots of mini-games and possibilities, achievements. All of them end up in a game over, telling you that this is not that kind of game. If you game over in all the possible games, you get an alternative ending where you get scolded for having waisted so much of your time on the game.

Narrative

Undertale has a great narrative story. Takes the counterpart of what's usually expected of the gamer.

Music

• Olafur Arnalds

Names

These are names for the shops, they are from various sources, but all link back to the theme of capitalism and illusion.

• Shell Beach (Dark City)
• John Galt airline (Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand)
• Screwtape hardware store (C.S. Lewis)
• Ellsworth Grove and Toohey Lane (The Fountain Head - Ayn Rand)

The game in itself

First, I'd like to make a game that I would love to play. Me, not being a gamer, I come to this game designing business a bit of a nooby-know-it-all; and truth be told, that's often were I find my own creativity.

A moral game

As a rule, I try never to make a game about killing. To me, games, like movies, are a good place to offer the opportunity for introspection and for a-priories bashing.

J'ai vu le Soleil should not be an exception to the rule. It will not feature zombies, but shall feel like it does. It shall feel like you're walking on your own grave, and ask the difficult questions of consumerism, modernism; the questions about the future (I heard David Wong say once, that we, as a people who watches to many post-apocalyptic movies, have turn into people who do not believe in a positive future at all), of course, matters of ecology both environmental and internal.

I would like this game to fuck with your mind so hard, it will make you change not the way you see games, but the way you live. It will make you question truths, politics, authority and mainly yourself.

One of the core ideas of this game as always been and shall remain the question: "Are you playing the game, or is it playing you?"

There be dragons

The space of the game is important. By that I mean, there is a physical space of the game.

It starts in the supermarket, when the doors close, at night, and you're trapped there and it turns into a maze. It might feel like the whole game is happening in this supermarket, but once you're done with the maze, you discover the mall.

The rules that have led you here, do not apply any longer. You are now in another space, with other rules. You are for all intent and purposes in an other game. There are different shops, with various purposes, they interact with you and you interact with them. Even the toilets are the place for a lesson and will make you think. The mall is a surrealistic place (see below).

Then, when you have found the exit, you are in the industrial zone. That a whole other game again. Open wide space. Shops every where. Neons off. Night time in the worst place humanity as come up with. It feels an looks at times like the ruins of a concentration camp. It's surrounded by barbedwire, fences and a giant hole in the ground, mostly telling you (or making you feel) that the end is nigh.

There is, a tower, a transmission tower, looking like a water tower from the seventies. Looking like it's going to fall apart. And the tower, is the last space, the first one going up, and up and up, with stairs like a stairway to heaven. The small room there is a panorama. You can see the valley, the city, the power plan. It's a world beyond the glass.

Path of least resistance

Going from place A to place B in the game has pretty much always two paths, the one is easy, requires brute force, going straight on, burning and pillaging.

The other one, necessitates the use of moral, careful planning, and attention to detail.

Zugzwang

Some places in the game are best travelled by not moving and not doing anything.

The first person gig

The mind puzzles

Surrealistic space

In this game, I'm looking for a principal space, the space of the mall, to be a starting point, an anchor to the real.

But behind some doors, down some escalators, you will find the unexpected, the unexpectable: Fields of grass and lumber with a shed-house in the middle, in which the mall leaves, landfills of perfectly functional products, polluted tropical beaches.

Some playable video-games in the game store, will impact the actual space of the game.

Even the maze will change shape when you're not watching.

Playing with time

Environments

The Supermarket

The moment you enter the game, your character enters the supermarket. Then out of nowhere, Lightning strikes.

The rhetoric

The language used inside the supermarket is one of opulence, of wealth. The wording is precise:

• Generous Formats
• Family pack
• Healthy Brands
• Tasty treats
• #1 selling
• 25% Free
• Fat Free

And although the wording is precise, the things to which it applies makes not fucking sens.

A bottle cannot 25% Free. It's a bottle, you cannot get only the 25% free part of the liquid in it.

A pizza cannot be generous. A format cannot be generous for that matter. Generosity is a character trait.

Brands are not Healthy and treats are tasty is just saying, they have a taste which... is not aiming that far.

The Labyrinth

When the lights comes back-on, after a little while, you realize that the layout changed.

The supermarket has become a labyrinth.

You can see the exit sign and if you get there, you realise that there is no exit there. The doors are padlocked. And there is just no way you'll find a key. There are keys, somewhere, behind a counter, but they won't help... If you do go back for the keys and successfully come back to the exit, on the door, you'll find written "no key will open that door. There is no escaping mercantile capitalistic society."

The Food Section

The Culture Section

The Toys Section

The Actual Exit

The Mall

The mall is a vast network of shops and corridors.

It has only one level, but through some openings in the celling, you can see the night sky, the darkness and cold of the night.

Most shops are turned off, or empty, giving the place a feel of an empty ruin.

The loop home

in one hallway, there is a escalator going down to some kind of underground parking lot... except, the entrance of the parking lot is full of grass.

The moment you get into the parking lot, you realise that you can see the sky above you, you are in a field.

Up ahead is a cabin. Inside the cabin, is an escalator... that leads to the entrance of the field. The same exact escalator.

If you try riding the escalator up again, you get back to the cabin.

Behind the cabin, some ways away, you'll find a dump. The dump is filled of the objects found in the supermarket. All of the junk is brand-new.

After a few winding alleys, you'll find a door that opens in the mall corridor. A bathroom door.

The broken forest of your dark thoughts

There is a shop, that sells mirrors. The further in you get, the more you realize, it has no end.

It is utterly meaningless but, you'll find a way to make it make sense to you.

The Cyber Church

There place, in the middle of an opening, that looks like a chapel from the outside.

Inside though, the glass-work is replaced by CRTs, on the altar stands a old Mac. Cables fall from the aisle and fly through the nave.

The Organ is a giant Dvorak keyboard. The whole is covered with facebook quotes, Wikipedia pages, animated gif looping on CRTs. It's quite dark. A commentary on the new kind of worship.

The Sinking fishing boat

Shell Beach

Pripyat

The Parking Lot

The Parking lot is abandoned. Nature has taken back its right over concrete and asphalt alike. It's still night.

You are alone here. All the shops around are lit with flickering, broken down neon signs. They look as appealing as a closed asylum. There is nothing in them but vast, empty shelves. Some of them are opened, other are cardboarded or closed. It feels like this has had it's glory days and now, it's barely surviving.

There is a fast food chain of some sort. It's the one thing that seems not opened because it's too late, but still functional. You can buy something from its vending machines.

The outside

A little way off the parking lot, there is a fence, preventing anyone from going out. The fence, doesn't circle around though.

There are places where you can pass through, push a little further, through a small part of wilderness, punctuated by empty bottles, plastic bags, old caddies...

And passed that, you see the truth. A giant hole in the ground that feels bottomless. Like an old open-mine. You can hear the darkness. There is no escape. If you jump you will fall, eternally and vanish into oblivion.

In the far distance, you can see the unnatural lit clouds emanating from some factory you cannot yet see. In the night, it feels like you have lost your purpose by going so far out.

There are around, a few dead end roads that lead to the hole on the one side, and to the fence on the other. Here and there, you can find a hole in there to get back in.

The only light you see from here anymore, comes from The Relay Tower.

Yggdrasil

There is a relay tower, form the 70's atop a hill, you are drown there. It's an horrible piece of architecture, you wonder how it can still stand. The fence is open and you can climb in it. The stairs are endless and there is graffiti on the walls, spelling out a story. The story of a giant who ate it all and then died of starvation.

At the very top, a room filled with antiquated machinery. Almost like an old space station. Through the window, you can see the nuclear power-plant, spewing its vapours into the night. If you won, you can now see it just shut down, and all the lights of the distant city go dark... after a moment, you will find the beauty of the night sky will be the only thing left and you can still play the game, go down the tower, walk the parking lot, while the end credits are playing and the music is telling you that may be, humanity can survive now.

But if you lost, you'll be the witness to the explosion of the nuclear plant. You'll now be able to walk the everything while the end credits are playing, but this time, under an nuclear winter snow. The music will be more dramatic.

The conclusion

A voice over, simple, quite dark appears through the sky, like the voice of a God.

"We have been expecting an apocalypse so long that we have been doing nothing while fifteen of them came. 
"We have been trapped in a self fulfilling prophecy of cataclysms and inactions.
"We are disappearing into the night for having worshipped false idols like the economy and the entertainment industry.
"We are being slaughtered for loosing sight of the purpose of simple morals and virtues.
"We are now lost because we could not believe in a future that is good, beautiful, plentiful and just. 
"We are the victim of greed and sarcasm."

Puzzles

System

Labyrinth

The first level turns into a labyrinth.

There are a few consideration to take into account there:

• Shall it be a procedural labyrinth, making it infinitely replayable and also, possibly, fucking with the player by changing it on the fly
• 2D labyrinth generation is a well-known solved problem. Turning a metaphorical 2D representation into a 3D space might not be too challenging, but it remains to be seen.
• The placement of indications and loot

Specifications

There should be in the best of cases two types of mazes.

• The supermarket should get you almost lost. The supermarket is a simple maze, with cells and walls (shelves). It is special in this:
  • it has an in and an out point
  • some shelves can loop around an inaccessible cell
• The mall is a smaller scale maze, because it has areas of interest, circulation flows and shops along the paths. It's closer to a traditional dungeon.

Supermarket Maze

The supermarket maze is a binary tree:

• Each cell is a node of the tree
• Each branch is a path with a boolean:
  • True is Open
  • False is Closed

Generating the Maze

1. evaluate which is the longest possible path (visiting cells only once)
2. if we now close the shorter paths, we get a simple, walkthrough.

Mall Maze

Research

• http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/algrithm.htm
• http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorithm-recap.html

Implementation

Developpment

Children AI

Recursive Space

Art