An interview with a gifted artist and a coder, Amelie and Brice of Miju Games:
The 2-Person French Developers ‘Miju Games’ shines with their first major title that takes you to the magical world of wizardry. Miju Games is setting up its place among the elite indie developers. Their first major title 'Abracadabrew' is fascinating and it has exciting artwork, which is entirely done by Amelie. Her magic spells have transformed her powerful imagination into cute artworks. Amelie is helped by Brice who defies the bugs and decrypts the game code.
Felt greatly excited about Miju
Games, I approach the team for interview. I feel privileged by their consent. The
interview session is held with the talented artist and developer, Amelie and
Brice.
Q1. It will be a pleasure to know more about you and what drives you into starting your own studio. Please tell us some more about Miju Games.
We always liked video games. As
kids, we were playing on every kind of platform. Growing up, it was always a
dream to create our own studio and make games, but it was not an easy thing to
do. Last year, we realized we could combine our skills (I’m a programmer and
Amélie is an artist) to make games with Unity. We started learning the basics
and tried different things to see what we could achieve. We figured out it was
possible to make small indie games, so we decided to start the journey of
founding a small indie studio!
Q2. What were your dreams as a teen?
Brice: Growing in the 90s,
everyone wanted to be the next Bill Gates, so I guess that’s why I started
learning computer engineering. But when you grow up, you realize dreams can be
revisited :-D
Amélie: As far as I can remember,
I’ve always held a pencil and, as a child, I always said I wanted to become a
“drawist”. As an illustrator I can now say that dreams might be prophetic,
sometimes :)
Q3. Which one is the last video game that you played till the end?
Brice: I finished Doom 2016
recently, multiple times, too many times! :)
Amélie: I have an ongoing game of
Stardew Valley that I hope I’ll never finish! So I don’t clearly remember what
was the last game I played till the end, but I would say Gris. Which is a
masterpiece.
Q4. What inspired “Abracadabrew”?
We wanted to create a game that
forces you to cooperate and communicate.
There are a lot of co-op games,
but in most of them, you can win without really cooperating.
So we asked ourselves, what kind
of gameplay would force cooperation and communication. We came out with the
idea of a single place where everyone needs to input elements exactly one after
the other as quickly as possible. After that, the potions, the witches and the
rest came naturally. After this idea, we took inspiration from books and movies,
like Harry Potter and things like that.
Q5. What made "Abracadabrew" fun for you personally?
The Chaos! With 4 players, it can
become really chaotic and you’ll end up screaming to your friends and laughing
at your mistakes. And the part where you have to memorize the places of the
ingredients makes it challenging, and we kinda dig that.
Q6. How do you handle art?
Brice: Amélie is making all the
art of the game. Everything you see has been carefully crafted in our small
french apartment during this last year. Each and every piece of art for
Abracadabrew is hand-drawn and digitally painted. It’s a long and tedious
process, there have been a lot of iterations for everything on screen and we
tried to create a coherent world in terms of graphic assets.
Q7. What are the challenging aspects of your job?
One of the challenging aspects is
that there are so many things to do. You have of course to create a game, and
that's already a challenge by itself.
But then, you have to put
together a trailer, set up the Steam store page and configure Steam packages,
create a Discord, a mailing list, engage with your community, etc...
After that, you need to promote
your game. Try to reach out to people who could like it and spread the word on
social media and press.
Did I say you have to debug
everything, make sure you have a backup system, find some contractors, always
learn and increase your fan base? :D But it’s worth it and we are really proud
of what we achieved for our first game.
Q8. Which one is your most popular game?
We released "Wild
Child" for free on itch.io in 2019. It was a small project for us to try
some things and increase our knowledge on Unity and such.
The game had received some
attention and had been downloaded more than 1000 times.
We are launching Abracadabrew on
October 14th and we hope it will become our most popular game! :)
Q9. Which goals you put in front of you while working on new projects?
We want our games to reflect us
and our ideas. We don’t really like brutality, so we want to make peaceful
games. We try to make our games attractive without using all the “hacks” that
make players stay completely hooked to the game. We are trying to give a good,
simple and hopefully fun experience for the players to enjoy. We would say
that’s our main goal. We try to achieve a certain level of quality too.
Q10. Which retro games inspired you to become indie game developer / publisher?
Brice: I’m not sure what to call
“Retro” at this point. When I was young, I loved “Black & White” and read
everything about it’s creator Peter Molyneux. I loved “Deus Ex” too, and I was
amazed by the complexity of the game. I finished it at least 10 times, and
every time it was a different story!
Amélie: Creatively speaking I
would say the first game to inspire me as a young kid has been Super Mario
Bros. 3. I couldn’t say why exactly, but I remember chasing super leaves and
changing into Raccoon Mario a lot :) As a teenager, I really liked the creative
vibe of Zelda Minish Cap which was really immersive.
Dear Brice and Amelie, it's an honor to interview you. I appreciate your time, your abilities and passion. I pray greater successes for your team.
Fans! It is a great opportunity to look into and wishlist Miju Games' most popular title 'Abracadabrew' on Steam.
Post a Comment