Art is Strange: talking with Dontnod about challenges and inspiration

The EGX Rezzed is one of the most awaited appointments in London during spring. It usually anticipates BATFA Awards and behind its doors, indie developers show their creations while an impressive amount of great panels full of special guests fill the calendar between the many hand-ons available. During one of these panels titled "Developing Daniel", Co-Game Director and Writer Jean-Luc Cano and Producer Luc Baghadoust talked about the new challenge creating Life is Strange 2 and what inspired the team. After this half an hour of interesting backstage, I had the pleasure to talk with them and delve into the topic.

Patrice Désilets restarts from the very beginning

The story of human evolution is amazing. Non-linear, chaotic, unexpected. We started from a curious adaptive advantage, the ability to discern the red colour from the rest of the range, which helped us to distinguish unique elements: ripe fruit, safe food, a way to survive. Soon those resources diminished and from the trees, we pushed ourselves towards the ground, an insidious environment that forced us to rise on the strength of our legs, widening the horizons. The walk became a run and the run then blurred into a marathon of millions of years. Now we are the pinnacle of the food chain, self-conscious, able to perceive the extraordinary miracle of existence. At the head of Panache Digital, Patrice Désilets - Assassin's Creed's dad - wants us to experience all these things through Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, his new, ambitious creature.

Drinking from the Firehose: No Man's Sky case as the mirror of the industry

"The intensity of the feedback was overwhelming but I decided: you either had to hide or you had to face it, so I did something that I wouldn't recommend but I decided to kind of drink from the Firehose. Every mail that you send to Hello Games goes directly to my folder (...), we didn't block or mute peolpe, if you talked about No Man's Sky then I probably read it."

With these words, Sean Murray, guilty of having been part of a failed mechanism, starts to talk about a long process of redemption. From the stage of the 2019 edition of the Game Developer Conference, the founder of Hello Games, visibly tense, shares his experience as a developer. His story is, at the same time, the sum of all that is good and unsustainable in the video game industry.