Rose: For someone who has never heard of your game, how would youdescribe it without using the usual genre labels?
Well, it should be quite easy, since we have a hard time fitting into the usual genre labels. When you launch one of our games, you're presented predominantly with a reading experience, augmented with hundreds of illustrations, and a cinematic musical score and sound design. Throughout the story, you'll be asked to make choices that will influence how the main character evolves and rises up to the challenges presented to them, as well as nudging the plot in several directions. We've been making this
kind of games for more ten years, but what's special for After the Wane is that we included several dance scenes all animated by hand using rotoscoping, based on live dancers performances we've captured ourselves especially for the game.
Rose: Where did the idea for this game come from?
This game is part of a series that explores the theme of the protagonist going through an identity crisis, alongside a generous serving of urban fantasy and magical realism. In Along the Edge, we explored how leaning into a supernatural explanation (or stubbornly refusing to do so) can help you overcome trauma. In Across the Grooves, we pondered about how small events can have a profound effect on your life and how you can rediscover an old version of yourself you thought you'd lost forever in the mundanity of everyday, adult life.
For this third instalment, we wanted to follow through with with the central themes of the series, and we decided to question the idea of embodiment, of physicality, and the relation to self. The idea to do it through the lens of a dancer who's trying to kickstart her career while looking for her origins, while the constant voice of the narrator comments her every moves seemed very fitting, as well as offering a wide field of expression for the illustrations to shine.
Rose: What makes your game different from other games in the samespace?
Well, we occupy a space that is not that dissimilar to visual novels. However, what sets up apart is our peculiar way of tackling player choices. Of course, we have the classic branching paths letting you go this way or that, but we also take into account every single dialog choice in an incremental way, nudging the personality of the main character with each interaction. Cumulatively, each of these small decision snowballs into sweeping changes in the later parts of the story.
Rose: Was there anything you had to cut that you still secretly wish youcould put back?
Making a game is always a negotiation between artistic ambitions and the reality of staying within the bounds of a somewhat reasonable scope and budget. This time, what stung the most was to cut down some dance animations that would have been nice to add, but that weren't integral to the core of the story. If the game is successful enough to justify it, we might be tempted to add them back in a post-launch update.
Rose: What is something players probably won't realize took an absurdamount of work?
I think the kind of games we make looks easy and cheap to produce to players until you really put thoughts into what went into creating it. We often hear that "it's only text, pictures, and some music, right"? Well, yes, but it's about 120 000 words, more than 1000 illustrations and nearly 3 hours of music. Each of the animated sequences is hundreds of frames, all individually drawn by hand. All the choices of the branching narrative are accounted for and set up in a cohesive story so that every small branch
feels natural. I could go on, but you get the point, it's a massive endeavour for a studio of four and a team of around twenty people when you count everyone who had a hand in making it. There's also the less visible things. Localization is way more expensive and involving that most people realise. Each new language means translating a novel-size corpus of text that then needs to be fully proofread and quality-checked. Another thing people don't realize is that each dialog bubble is placed
individually on the screen, taking into account which side is allowed to get bigger if the translation is longer than the original text. It's a meticulous and time-consuming work (but I love it nonetheless). In some of our games, depending in our design choices, part of the text presentation can automated, but I have sometimes placed more than 9000 text bubbles for our most demanding titles.
Rose: What is the weirdest bug you've encountered that you almostwanted to keep?
Well, due to the peculiarities of our games, we don't often encounter funny or weird bugs. But I can tell you one anecdote from our first game, Echoes, which initially came out in 2013. It has elements of body horror that come into light in later parts of the plot. The story is told through the quill of the protagonist, who is trying to write down what happened to him during his investigation (it is also a kind of film noir police drama) before losing his mind (a classic cosmic horror trope). So, we had scenes that depicts him sitting at a desk, writing in the present time, while most of the story is told through flashbacks. In one of
these scenes, Nico, our art director and main illustrator, made the mistake of drawing an extra finger to his writing hand (note that it was years before generated slop made a habit of giving everyone a copious amount of polydactyly). There was something uncanny in the picture, but we couldn't pinpoint what it was at first. We ended up keeping the mistake in the game, as it was a subtle foreshadowing of what was to come.
Rose: Is there a particular emotion you wanted players to walk away with from your game?
It only happened a very few times, but we had a couple of reviews for our games over the years that said, in substance, that going through the experience made the reader realise something about themselves, or help them go through a rough time in their life. That's the best compliment we could hope for, but I'd happily settle for "I had a good time playing it".
Rose: What's one piece of advice you wish you'd had before starting?
Here's what I usually tell to budding fellow game devs: first, beware of your scope. It's better to have a small, finished game rather than a big, ambitious, but half-baked one that you never ship. Second, try not to gamble your whole life and your future on your first game. Overnight success is a myth. You're in it for the long run. Chances are, your first game will be a commercial failure, but you'll learn valuable lessons while going through the whole process of making and releasing it to an audience.
Make sure you give yourself and your studio another chance. Having a list of games you want to make is a healthy way to manage expectations. Be as excited for the next project as for the one you're working on right now.
Rose: Five years from now, what do you hope people remember about this game?
I hope they still remember it, first. If it leaves an impression akin to a good novel or a good movie, I'll be very glad. Maybe they'll want to revisit their choices and make another playthrough? See where they end up this time around?
Rose: Why should someone reading/watching this go play your game today?
If you're intrigued by anything I said, or anything you've seen, heard, or read about After the Wane, please consider buying it. We're a small studio, we struggle to make ends meet and to keep afloat in a world that's burning and is getting more and more hostile every day. Every sale makes a difference for us. Also, while you're at it, please do all the things you're usually asked to do in order to feed the almighty algorithms that governs our modern lives: share it on socials, leave a review, etc. You know the drill.
Rose: Finally, the question we ask every developer: After everythingyou’ve told us, can you officially confirm that your game is, in fact, probably a game? Why should we believe you?
We're not even sure the games we make are in fact games, so, who am I to tell? You definitely shouldn't believe me and check out for yourselves!