March 2022. On stage, a small group of young people come to receive their Stick to the best student game for Lysfangha. The sequence will mark the minds of those present at La Cigale that afternoon for the delivery of the French video game trophies, as one of the winning students will be overwhelmed with emotion on stage, to the point of losing words and making room . smile at such naturalness.
Fifteen months later, it was on the stage of Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest that Lysfanga looks big. Little Student Game Goes Big: Meanwhile, He Lost His H And Added The warrior of the change of time in their name, thanks to the talent of their creators, but also thanks to multiple encounters. “When you leave school, you have to go through the paperwork to set up a studio. It is not necessarily what you want to do or know how to do”, admits to Tech&Co Thibault Legouet, game director of Lysfanga: The Warrior of Time Change. “Fortunately, we found people who helped us.
older brothers to help
From Michael Sportouch, former head of Activision Europe and still invested in creating video game projects, to the Quantic Dream teams that approached them to support and edit the game, these Isart Digital alumni were able to count on advice from professionals to create their own studio, Sand Door, and give another dimension to Lysfanga.
“Quantic Dream is the best of both worlds,” says Matthieu Schneider, Sand Door’s manager. “They know how to make games and they gave us opportunities we couldn’t have had, like testing, artistic feedback, which add real value. If we had done it alone, it wouldn’t have been the same game, we would have had to compromise.
And Thibault Legouet to acknowledge: “Quantic Dream gave us total creative freedom. We are delighted. They didn’t ask us to put anything in or take anything out. This game is really the game we wanted to make. And then, it is also in the visibility that they give us a lot. The impact is plural and real in the final quality of the game”.
Go back in time to move forward
Lysfanga is a hack’n’slash (cut and slice in French), that is to say, a game that privileges combat against waves of enemies to eliminate generally with the sword, but strategically to go out and improve your character. But what undoubtedly seduced Quantic Dream was his little personal touch: the tactical twist of going back in time to clone himself and thus multiply simultaneous attacks thanks to his doubles. A kind of collaboration with oneself very nice to play and easy to learn.
“I came up with the idea for the end-of-study project from my gaming experiences, what I saw or didn’t see, what I wanted, and especially cinema,” explains Thibault Legouet. “I really like movies from bygone eras. I saw an episode of futurama in which a character who has gone to the past to steal a work returns to the present and finds himself surrounded by clones doing different things. I kind of clicked and said to myself, it would be cool to do this in the game and have the NPCs (non-playable characters, editor’s note) be my past self.
This project, if it took six months to develop successfully at Isart Digital, earning them a graduation award, will have taken a bit longer as it moves into adulthood. “We have been working on the idea for three years and we have been working on the final version for three years,” sums up its creator. “It’s the same concept as the student project that we expanded more than 20 times or so.” Lysfanga has thus gone from 4 levels to the more than 90 announced, maintaining “its legacy from the initial game”, but “starting from scratch with much higher ambitions”. And to see how far they can go in time, we will have to wait until the end of 2023 and the release of the game on PC.
Quantic Dream, talent scout
Behind Lysfanga is now Spotlight by Quantic Dream, the new video game publishing label from David Cage’s French studio. The latter thus wants to focus on independent developers and, after Sea ofSolitude: The Director’s Cut in 2021 it offers two small hexagonal pearls to start under its new banner. Car Spotlight is also the publisher ofUnder the wavesa game that made a strong impression at the last Gamescom.
With its journey to the depths of the oceans as well as to the emotional depths, Parallel Studio’s narrative game has revealed itself a little more as an adventure game to follow, both for the beauty of its seabed, its message about the environment atmosphere as well as its plot and its hero, Stan, a lonely professional diver marked by grief and faced with mysterious events. Unless it’s his own madness.
For the Parisian studio behind Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain and the next star wars eclipse, his 26 years of experience should serve to help the young teams that create these games to face “the multiple challenges they will face” and be a “guarantee of quality” for them. And Spotlight does not intend to stop there. Other projects are in preparation and will be announced shortly. A new part of activities for Quantic Dream that wants to see further since the arrival of the Chinese giant NetEase in its capital and gain a favorite place among the tenors of the sector.
Source: BFM TV
