Le blog d'un ingénieur Web qui fait des jeux vidéo.
Welcome to a new story about my studio's next game: Corpus et Spiritus. Today I'm telling you where the game concept came from and how it took form. And we're currently running an open playtest, so read on if you want to have fun with us! Where did Corpus et Spiritus come from? Corpus et Spiritus initially started after we finished Dawnmaker. I wanted to make a second game as fast as possible, by…
Avec un bon mois de retard — janvier n'a pas été de tout repos — voici enfin venir mon bilan de l'année 2025. Au programme : la fin (enfin) de Dawnmaker, un nouveau jeu, et c'est à peu près tout, mais c'est déjà beaucoup ! Projets principaux Arpentor Studio Mon entreprise — c'est désormais quasiment exclusivement mon entreprise, j'en reparle plus tard — se porte correctement. L'exploitation de…
I am happy and proud to let you know that Corpus et Spiritus is now officially announced ! As of today, it has a public Steam page and a ✨ trailer ✨. Check it out: Corpus et Spiritus is a roguelite deckbuilder without combat. You signed a pact with a Homunculus: it will guide you on the path of alchemy, but at the cost of your life force. Use your workshop to craft new cards, transmute metals and…
It's been 3 years since I started working on Dawnmaker full-time with Alexis. The creation of our first commercial game coincided with the creation of Arpentor Studio, our company. I've shared a lot of insights along the way on this blog, from how we made our first market research (which was incredibly wrong) to how much we made with our game (look at the difference between the two, it's……
Une sortie de jeu, enfin un peu d'argent pour Arpentor Studio, et une fin d'année difficile : c'est l'heure du bilan de mon année 2024 ! Projets principaux Arpentor Studio Le bilan d'Arpentor Studio sur 2024 est mitigé : d'un côté, nous avons réussi à sortir notre premier jeu, Dawnmaker , et c'est un petit miracle. De l'autre, nous avons généré un chiffre d'affaire d'environ 9 000€, et c'est très,…
About a year ago, I wrote a piece explaining how much we estimated making Dawnmaker would cost . Well, Dawnmaker is finished, so as promised, I'm going to revisit that and show you how much it actually cost to produce our game! Yay, more money talk! In June 2023, I made a budget for Dawnmaker that projected the game would cost a total of 520k€ to make. A year later, I can announce that the total…
We released Dawnmaker 18 days ago, and I'm due for a report on numbers. Everybody loves numbers, right? Here are ours! First a little context: Dawnmaker is a turn-based, solo strategy game mixing city building and deckbuilding. Basically, it's like a board game but digital and solo. We've been working on this title for 2.5 years, as a team of two people: myself, doing game design and programming,…
We are 5 days away from the release of Dawnmaker ! It is a time of excitement, of stress of course, but also of regrets as we realize that there are so, so many things that we will not be able to add to our game. Let's introduce today's topic with a short video that is very à propos : Download the MP4 . A game is never truly done. There's always the next thing you want to add, the little detail…
When I was 13, my mom bought me Civilization III from a retail shop, then went on to do some more shopping. I stayed in the car, with this elegant box in my hands, craving to play the game it contained. I opened the box, and there discovered something magical: the Civilization III Manual. Having nothing better to do, I started reading it… That game manual was THICK . More than 20 years later, I…
Let's face it: Dawnmaker still has some important flaws. We're aware of that, and we are working on those flaws. One of the biggest remaining problem with the game was that one of its core mechanics, the oppression of the Smog, was… well, not explained at all. If you didn't have a developer behind your back to tell you, there was almost no way you could understand it. What's the oppression of the…
Dawnmaker, le jeu sur lequel je travaille dans le cadre d' Arpentor Studio , depuis plus de deux ans, a désormais une page Steam et un trailer . Je vous laisse découvrir ça : Ça vous a plu ? N'hésitez pas à ajouter le jeu à votre liste de souhaits sur Steam !
L'année 2023 est terminée, donc comme depuis trois ans, c'est l'heure de dresser un bilan de ce que j'ai fait ces douze derniers mois. Je démarre cette retrospective avec la sensation de n'avoir « rien » fait, mais c'est parce que je me suis concentré essentiellement sur un seul et unique projet, notre jeu Dawnmaker. Vous allez le voir, l'année a en fait été bien chargée pour moi. En route pour le…
Today we are releasing a new version of Dawnmaker, with two big changes. The first one is the 2D board, which I talked about in my previous blog post . The second one is a new feature called "Ruins and Rewards". That feature… adds ruins and… changes rewards. Yeah. Pretty good name, right? As with everything we do in this game, there is a good reason. So let's start with why we're changing things:…
If you've played Dawnmaker in the last 6 months, you will have noticed, hopefully, that the board was rendered in 3D. After having received a lot of questions and criticism about that feature, we've decided a few months ago to redo the whole board rendering in 2D. After two months of work, I am proud to announce that Dawnmaker will soon have a new version containing only two dimensions! Today…
Over the last few months we've had the opportunity to show Dawnmaker to a lot of people, and notably a few publishers. We had the good fortune of receiving very valuable feedback on the game, which allowed us to identify two important problems with it, or at least, with its demo. The first problem is that our artistic direction isn't compelling enough, but that will not be today's topic — though…
While we were preparing for this year's Game Camp in Lille, we had to work on our pitch for publishers. Part of that was refreshing our budget and making it as accurate as we could, so that 1. we know exactly how much money we need to ask for in order to comfortably finish our game and 2. publishers can see how much the game would cost and compare that to their revenue estimates. So, how much does…
Il est l'heure, tardive, de faire le point sur mon année 2022 ! Vous allez le lire, l'année a été chargée, ce qui explique que j'ai un peu de retard dans la rédaction de ce billet… Mais pour me faire pardonner, je vous ai mis quelques recommandations culturelles à la fin ! Voici donc un résumé de ce que j'ai fait en 2022… Projets principaux Arpentor Studio Mon projet principal en 2022 a évidemment…
Since we released Phytomancer in October 2021 , my associate Alexis and I have been working on our next steps: building our second game, and building the company that will make it. Today, I want to share the process we went through to create that company, and explain why we went through each of those steps. I will not discuss administrative tasks, as that is quite specific to France. Instead, I…
Late last year, my associate Alexis and I started working on our next commercial game. Our goal being not only to make games, but also to build a company and make it financially sustainable, we did market research very early in the process. Today I want to walk you through how we did that specific market research. My goals with this article are, of course, to share my current knowledge with…
J'ai du mal à y croire, mais l'année 2021 se termine déjà. Voici donc le moment de faire le point sur cette période qui marque concrètement un tournant dans ma carrière : je suis désormais officiellement créateur de jeux vidéo. Pour preuve : des gens ont dépensé de l'argent pour jouer à un jeu que j'ai créé ! Au moment de faire le bilan de cette année, je me rends compte que ce premier jeu, et sa…