With Meet The Team, Draw Me A Pixel introduces you to the people behind its games. We promise, no one bites. At least not yet!
What is your job and can you describe your role within the team?
Officially I’m a Lead Programmer but in such a small team, we’ll say that I’m the technical referent and the only developer. My activities range from animated meetings around the presentation and validation of the game design, to the technological watch and the choice of tools and hardware used by the company, as well as some customer support. But most of my time is spent on the development tools and on programming alone.
Later on when the team grows, I expect to do a bit more management and planning.
What was your background, before joining Draw Me A Pixel?
I have a rather classical and general training as a computer engineer but video game development has been with me since high school. My first significant experience was at Coktel Studios in Paris where I developed educational games.
I’ve been working at several video game studios since then, with closures and third-party projects that were not always creative but often stressful. So I took the opportunity twice to emancipate myself and to work independently with a few people (Pascal and Sophie) that I liked and who shared the same will. After a first failure, followed by a less playful but more rewarding personal incursion, we tried our luck together on the basis of this very original project.
What are the best and worst aspects of your job?
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is a game that brings a lot of variety in its development even under the guise of a point-and-click and that’s its appeal. Each scene has its own challenges and it’s exciting. The counterpart is that it is very difficult to think in terms of genericity, since you can always do things that are out of the ordinary, such as playing with elements of the interface.
But the least interesting part of the game is obviously the debugging phase which puts you in front of your own mistakes and sometimes requires you to test again and again certain game phases to the point of not enjoying them anymore.
Which chapter from There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension is your favorite?
The game is full of great moments. I could talk about the musical part of chapter 5 with the rap and especially Gigi’s song but I wouldn’t be very original because I know that it was well liked.
But in the end I have a lot of affection for the encounter with Game at the very beginning because it is the first contact we have with the game, it is well paced and it brings fun by this paradoxical struggle to have the possibility to play.
The encounter with Game in There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension.
What are your favorite video games besides There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension?
I have a rather heterogeneous taste. I like “great” games (be careful, I didn’t necessarily say AAA) which know how to catch me by a clever alchemy between immersive universe, richness of the narration and game mechanics. So in no particular order we can find games like Dragon Age: Origins, Hollow Knight, Elex, Death Stranding or even The Secret of Monkey Island for the older ones, but there are so many others.
How does it feel to finally be able to talk about Crushed In Time after all this time?
I'm going back to bed...
Crushed In Time: Help Guillaume find his bedroom by adding our game to your wishlist!