Amélie Guinet talks about being nominated for 'Excellence in Visual Arts' for To Hell With the Ugly at IGF
Can you tell us more about La Poule Noire ?
La Poule Noire is a 'SCOP' (a worker cooperative) composed of video game craftspeople, which was founded by three friends who met at ENJMIN, and who spent a few years in the gaming industry, at companies of all scales. We released our first game 'Edgar, Bokbok in Boulzac' in 2020, and our new game To Hell With The Ugly will be available on Steam very soon. We are now 6 people working for the cooperative and we punctually get outside help for some tasks. Most of them work in Angoulême, at the moment I am the only one working from Lyon.
To Hell with the Ugly
Tell us about yourself
I've been working on indie games for more than 7 years (2Dark, There is no Game), and occasionally on board games (Unlock, Wild Space). Now, I'm an associate-employee at LPN, and I've been a Game Artist there for 5 years. I am a kind of Swiss Army knife. My job is to define the artistic direction of our games. I also take care of the asset creation (characters, scenery, UI), integrate, and sometimes animate them in the Unity game engine. I build the scenes of our games (Level Design, trigger placements, staging levels...), with the precious help of Adrien Marchand, David Duriot, and Clément Duquesne. I also work closely with Fiona Rosette, our Game Designer.
How did you adapt a novel into a video game?
Our game To Hell With The Ugly is the adaptation of a novel by Boris Vian. In his book, the author gives us a lot of details about the environment, which plunges us directly into Los Angeles in the 50's, we wanted it to be as immersive in our game, it was a starting point for the construction of the Art Direction.
There was a huge amount of reference work, in films, in architecture, objects, and clothes of the time... It was a challenge to represent L.A., a city we didn't know, at a time before we were even born. Boris Vian had never been to the United States either and said he was offering a fantasized vision of the American society, so we also allowed ourselves to offer a semi-realistic representation of L.A. in the 1950s.
In the novel, Boris Vian criticizes the superficial side of humans by inventing caricatured characters. By choosing a semi-realistic style for our characters, we were able to magnify certain character traits.
We echoed the traditional "animation classics" of the 50s and 60s thanks to the frame-by-frame animations made by Gaelle Roques for the fights and the scripted sequences. Finally, we wanted the color palette to be an integral part of the game's art direction: The fans are running high, we are in LA, the mercury is rising, the hero Rock Bailey is hot under the collar in this story. All of this evokes warm colors!
How do you feel about the nomination of To Hell With the Ugly at IGF?
The nomination of To Hell with the Ugly in the Excellence in Visual Art category of the IGF was a huge surprise, we didn't expect it at all and we are very proud that the game is represented, especially alongside Tunic, which we find magnificent. It's a victory for us that a game designed without crunch and in the respect of employees' well-being, can also be recognized.
Any plans for the future?
The release of To Hell With The Ugly will be announced very soon. For the moment we are working on our next project, a more intimate original creation.