My love story with small games
In mid-November, on the recommendation of my friends at ARF Games Studio, I was invited to Uruguay to give a talk and host a workshop at the Level UY Summit 2024. It’s a video game festival that gathers the Uruguayan game industry once a year around exhibitions, meetups, and conferences.
It was my first time traveling to South America, and also the first time presenting my work in front of such an audience... and in English. :)
It was an amazing experience, and I met wonderful people, both talented and incredibly welcoming. Uruguay is definitely a country where life feels good.
For the occasion, I prepared two presentations:
- “The Secret Power of Small Games”, where I talked about the strategy I’ve developed with Blumgi that allows me to make a living from creating my games.
- “Crafting Simplicity”, a workshop format where I shared my creative process for making small, simple, and effective games.
The feedback from the audience was really positive, and it was a great opportunity for some enriching exchanges for me as well. Here are a few photos:
To prepare for these presentations, I took a dive into my past to talk about my professional journey and especially my relationship with small games.
It all started with the Maximini project:
After working for years at Ankama in animation on the Wakfu series and other projects, I unexpectedly ended up co-creating my first games based on Ankama’s universes with a small team.
It was a project that combined a TV animation story aired in France with a video game extension on Ankama’s website. Yes my first game was a web game!
Programming: Florian Chatet
Art: Romain Pergod aka Sephy & Fabrice Nzinzi aka Ntamak
Sound: Ankama Sound Team
https://www.ankama.com/en
I fell in love with working on video games—way more than animation. So I kept going in my free time, and a bit later, with the same programmer, we created my first mobile game outside of the Ankama universe: King Tongue. This was the first time I worked on a creative commercial project entirely in my own universe.
Pierre-Jean Baudoin composed the music.
Etienne Marque made the Sound Design.
Then, I followed up with a second mobile game, this time with Romain Théry on programming and Florent Juchniewicz, who was an intern at the time, helping with game design: Drag‘N’Boom.
Pierre-Jean Baudoin: Music.
Gregory Desmurs: Sound Design.
Both games were featured by Apple, which brought them critical and commercial success.
After that, I left Ankama and joined a young studio called Madjoh, which later became Madbox.
At this time, Madbox was exploring the hyper-casual market, producing tons of tiny games very quickly, testing them on the market, and keeping only the ones that could be profitable on a larger scale.
Over four years, I worked on around 30 games, always with a programmer as my teammate.
https://madbox.io/
Out of those 30 games, one of them really took off: Stickman Hook, which I co-created with Valentin Barat. A few others survived, but most were killed off. I've learned a lot and people at Madbox were awesome but at that point, it felt like the right time for me to start my own game studio. And start to imagine what I 'd like to create.
What inspires me as designer:
I am passionate about Graphic Design, especially when it's very efficient.
A part of my graphic design book collection ❤️
Some Japanese mascots I photographed during my last trip to Japan (I took more than 1,000 pictures). I am fascinated by how these characters are both very simple and expressive!
Oink Games : This collection of (Japanese again) minimalist board games is awesome and beautiful!
https://oinkgames.com/en/
The My Famicase Exhibition (Japanese: わたしのファミカセ展) is an annual art show of fan-made Nintendo Famicom cartridge designs hosted by METEOR, an art gallery based in Tokyo, Japan.
https://famicase.com/
These games don't exist, but I love these designs and their variety so much!
That's the dream game collection I'd love to create with a bit more experience and money.
So when I started my own company that was the plan:
It’s been three years since I created Blumgi, and now I have so much creative freedom. None of my games get killed anymore. I have incredible partnersPoki, in particular, with whom I’ve built a great professional and friendly relationship.
It's incredible to know that thanks to Poki.com, my games are played for free all around the world, especially by a young audience. And that I can make a living from my work doing the games I like.
The Future?
I’m currently working on a new game with my friend Joachim Leclercq, supported by a regional grant from Picanovo. And I have lots of other projects in the pipeline for what’s next after this one :)
I’m still figuring out what to do with this blog/newsletter. Feel free to subscribe and let me know what you’d like to read here. 😄
- Advices about making games for Poki ?
- Designing games for a casual audience ?
- Creative Process / low cost high impact techniques ?
- Behind the scene / making of ?
- Small games experiments ?
- Nano games to play ? (5 minutes gameplay ?)
- Other ideas ?
You know some super cool micro games ? please share me a link :)
contact@blumgi.com
Loïc ️ 🏝️ 🏝️ 🏝️