Blancis a wholesome co-op game set in a beautifully hand-drawn world that follows a wolf pup and a fawn as they work together to survive after a massive snowstorm. Best experienced as a co-opmultiplayeradventure, the game is designed so that players of all ages and backgrounds can share the experience together thanks to its wordless narrative and accessible controls.
Game Rant recently spoke to Florent de Grissac, founder and game designer at Casus Ludi about the game’s design philosophy, the challenges and benefits of working with creative constraints, and the virtues of cooperation in gameplay.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Q: Blancis almost entirely text free. What were the challenges of making a game without words?
A: It’s a challenge, and it’s a challenge that we choose knowingly. We knew that we wanted to try it. The challenge is that you have to think of other ways to convey the stories and narrative than just words, obviously. And this is a very interesting challenge. Apart from that, it’s just a constraint that we choose. As you know, constraints in creativity are just frames that you choose for yourself. It brings a unique aspect to the creation. I’m very happy that we kept this choice. To be perfectly honest, at first, we wanted to be very, very hardcore with this choice, and we tried. We tried to design a game without any text. I mean, no menu, nothing. In the end, this was too much of a challenge. So there are menus, there are hints on how the game should be played, but no text for the narratives.
Q: Blancalso forgoes colors as another creative constraint. Did this present any interesting challenges when designing the game?
A: Yes, it’s also a constraint that we choose, knowing perfectly what we were doing. The idea came from the artist we work with, Raphaël, that was new to video game creation, and was very happy to participate in what at this point was only going to be a game jam. And for this game jam, he wanted to get back to simple drawing with just a pencil and paper. So we knew before going to the game jam that Raphaël wanted to do this kind of visual universe. Then it became more than agame jam gameand there were a few challenges.
One of them is that color is something that makes it easy to depict certain elements. For instance, we wanted this world to be not a winter world, but a world in spring or summer that has been covered by snow and should feel unexpected. Where birds can be black and white, you can’t make your red apples in the trees or red flowers. That limits our ability for us to make this environment feel odd or to feel strange, but we try to anyway.
The other point is visual fatigue for people. It’s white most of the time as the name of the game suggests. Some people told us that it was not easy to have this white screen in front of them for a long time. With adjustments and iteration we tried to have something that is not too tiring for people, yet everyone has a different sensitivity to this kind of visual effect. We know that some people will be more tired from this white screen than others, but we hope we did our best to have something not too tiring. And understandably enough it’s still like a drawing but in 3D, so you may ask yourself “What is this? I don’t really understand it.” Black and white is a constraint but it was a fun one, and it’s clearly a huge part of the identity and uniqueness ofBlanc.
Q:Speaking of the art style,Blanc’s art really sets it apart from most games. What was the process like for achieving that handcrafted look?
A: So the process originated with Raphaël, who is a comic artist and draws for a living, and when Rémi, the Game Director, brought him to the team for this game jam. It was a first for Raphaël, so we wanted to have something to take as much as we can from him that was not already seen in games. One of our credo at Casus Ludi is that if you make a game that is just like the other games you’ve already played, well, what do you bring to the table in the end? Yes, you can take pleasure in what you do and what you deliver, but in a way we want more than that when we create games, we want to try something new. To take things that are outside of the game world and bring them into games is something that we like to do. This is an example of that.
You want to draw with a pencil on paper, and it’s what do you want to do to illustrate the game? Okay, let’s try to convey this in a 3D world. As for the process, what’s unique and interesting is that Raphaël did all the drawings, everything that’s on-screen apart from silhouettes that are from the shader is taken from hishand drawing. He worked at various levels. He draws mostly on paper, he draws models, and he draws concept art for the 3D artists to make the models with. But also every material in the game, every texture is taken from his work. So when a 3d artist does a tree trunk based on his work, he asks “Raphaël, can you scribble on a piece of paper?” just to have this kind of material.
Then we scan it and bring it into the game, so everything has been handled by Raphaël as much as possible. Sometimes he worked in Photoshop, but very, very scarcely for the characters or the animals that we have in the game and some of the assets. At some point, he learned to use a 3D painting tool, so he painted the characters, and the textures of the characters are painted directly on the 3D models by Raphael.
Q:Besides the obvious visual component, what else do you believe makesBlancstand out as a game?
A: We like to bring something new. I don’t think we are incredible pioneers, in that we don’t bring something absolutely new. Some other games that we played inspired some part of the way we structure the project, but also the other constraints that we imposed on us are what makes a game unique, like no text and a narrative without any antagonism – we don’t want to rely on antagonism to create drama. This is something in Western literature and movie-making that is rarely seen (underused at least). What I’ve read from some Japanese writing is a drama structure based on non-antagonistic situations, but still other interesting drama. So that was what I wanted to try.
Also, the focus on cooperation, because most games are antagonistic. Not all games, obviously there are a lot of games that are not about competition and fighting and racing, but they are not the majority. So we wanted to add our game to thecategory of nonviolent game, with other things to say than just “compete and win”. This does not make the game unique, but it makes it go to a category where there are not that many games for now. And I hope there will be more because I’m convinced that games can be a lot more than what the vast majority are today.
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Q:Were there any features or design decisions that you felt were particularly important to include?
A: Yeah, the cooperation, the idea that the game is a two-player game. It’s part of the origin story of the game because we were at the game jam. And when you make a game for a game jam, it’s always a good idea to make something that several players can play together because at some point in the jam, when people are going from team to team to test games, it’s more fun to have something you can play with other people. You always attempt to think of something with local multiplayer in mind. It’s perfectly aligned with one of the ideas that I wanted to focus on that was cooperation and to have something focused on empathy and cooperation between the characters and the players.
The players between themselves, the players towards the characters, and the characters between themselves. So right from the start cooperation was something that interested us. As we made a game without outstanding difficulty, without violence, this cooperation mechanic made us want to design a game that could make people play together even when they are not at all at the same perspective, relative to games. People that never played video games can playBlancwith someone else that already played and they can enjoy this journey together. We wantedparents and childrento work together to play this game, so cooperation was really at the heart of what we designed. One funny thing about the design is that we were thinking “Okay, that will be nice because parents will be helping their children play the game. That would be really cool.” But when we tested the game at some events, we witnessed the opposite: young children teaching their parents how to play the game.
When we worked with Gearbox, there was a decision to take the corporation to another level, allowing people to play online, which is obviously a good idea for the reach of the game. Lots of people would want to play this way. It’s something that you have to share with someone, ideally, close to you.
Q: Blanc’s heartwarming tale, its lack of violence, and its adorable characters are so wholesome. Is this a response to today’s predominantly violent, dark entertainment?
A: I’m not against dark, violent entertainment. I playDoomand more recently,Metal: Hellsingerbecause it’s fun. I’m just convinced that video games are a medium like video, like music, and you can do anything with music, you can do anything with video, you can do anything with video games. But right now, most people just try one thing. Well, not one thing that’s an exaggeration, but there is not that much that has been tried with video games. For the last 10 years, there’ve been more and more experiments that have been really interesting. Like video games that are personal diaries, or video games used as a kind of therapy in the face of terrible events.
There are games about people coming from the Middle East to Europe and all the adversities they face. There are more and more people creating games since it’s way more accessible than years ago. So it’s great to see more and more people doing various things with video games. And I think any kind of entertainment, whether video games or even not entertainment, has a place. It’s just that right now, the vast majority of video games are competition, fighting, and everything. We don’t deny them. They totally have to exist. Maybe we just need less than that and more of other things. The same goes for cinema and TV shows, of course.
Q:How do you hope players will respond emotionally toBlanc?
A: We hope they will be touched by the story. Also that they will enjoy the companionship they can have through the game with the people that they’ll be playing with. We hope the receptions and feelings evoked byBlancwill be positive ones. We did not design something dramatic and horrible. We hope they will be emotional because we tried to design something without antagonism, but with drama, with a story that evolves during the game, and that comes to a conclusion that should be felt as fulfilling and just for the players.
Q:What would you say is the message thatBlancis trying to convey through its wordless narrative?
A: We prefer to convey the messages through the gameplay and the game context itself, more than in the narrative. So the fact that the game is a co-op game is a message in itself. The fact that there is no violence in the story is a message in itself. We don’t have what I can describe as any specific message from the story itself, but from the mechanisms, the context of the game, and everything, those messages are that we can enjoy ourselves without beating ourselves up. We can cooperate, because cooperation is, from my perspective, much more enjoyable than competition. I’m a huge board game player, I’ve played loads of board games and tabletop RPGs for years and the group I play with evolved from competitive games, like in the old days playinggames likeDunethat were like huge board games.
Right now, we are only playing co-op games because it’s more interesting. We are not at the stage where we want to compete among ourselves, we know that there is no point in that if someone is tired, they will lose, or if someone is more at ease with this kind of mechanic he will win. Okay, great. Not fun. But I think a challenge that we can face together and overcome through cooperation is interesting and fun. So we playMarvel Championsand7th ContinentandGloomhaven,Pandemic Legacy, all good games. So cooperation is one of the key messages from my perspective. It’s more fulfilling when there is cooperation instead of competition.
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Q:This is Casus Ludi’s debut commercial game. What kind of creative projects has the team worked on in the past?
A: Lots of creative projects. Lots of very weird projects if you take a look at them. Casus Ludi is more than eight years old now, so we’ve been here for quite some time. At first, we were working on news games, to convey messages about real-world news. So we made some games to inform, and other games were what we call “persuasive games” to deliver a specific message which is not neutral and advocates for something. We made these at Casus Ludi for a living, both by doing games we wanted to do because we just want to convey those messages, and sometimes for clients, a lot of which are public entities.
They are not true video games, most of the time, but we use game mechanics and things like that. We use that a lot to help design policies, for instance, in the sense of participative democracy or things like that, it’s kind of the core of our work with public entities and also with Rémi who is the creative director of the game, but who is not part of Casus Ludi. So yeah, we were already working together on projects. Some were small games, not this kind of scope, so it’s our debut game commercial game, but it’s not the first game we’ve made at all. We’ve madeboard gamesand video games in the past.
Q:Is there anything else you would like to say about the game that we haven’t covered?
A: I just hope that people will welcomeBlancas we send it as a kind of peace message. Something cute and agreeable that tells us that we can cooperate.
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Blancreleases February 14 on Nintendo Switch and PC.
