The Making of White Night
The survival horror with a Frank Miller’s Sin City aesthetic by Osome St…
I recently finished Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth and I distinctly recall the day its first trailer hit. Messaging another Amnesia: The Dark Descent aficionado, I was like: “There’s gonna be matches in it!”. Friend was like: “Why are you so pumped about this?”. I answered: “Maybe because matches will blow out as soon as we run, forcing us to play in a more grounded fashion?” This assertion was somehow right, at least for the first part of the game. Anyway, there has previously been another horror game which used a gameplay mechanic centred around matches. Enter Osome studio’s White Night.
In 2008, Eden Games had just released Alone in the Dark. contrary to its deceptive title, this was the fifth instalment in the series. Parallel to this, they had asked their developer to start working on a HD remake of the very first Alone in the Dark. Ronan Coiffec was part of the team which was supposed to imagine this reboot. Sadly, their new release didn’t meet the success the crumbling company expected and this re-imagining had to be dropped. Two other men worked at Eden Games through those challenging times: Matthieu Fremont and Domenico Albani.
While Romain Coiffec came from an artistic background in concept art, Fremont and Albani were both programmers. After 10 years in the AAA videogame industry, the trio were starting to feel a tad tired, a bit bored. As the thirty-something years-old they were, they soon envisioned of creating their very own studio.
Scroll through a lot of those guys interviews and you’ll stumble upon a very interesting facts: their love of prototyping. According to the whole set, this is what makes videogame but in a sterile environment such as big companies this tend to be forgotten. With lead turning to more mainstream concept which can be more easily assimilated by a large number of paying customers. It’s interesting to see them venting about their need of testing new ideas, new concept when one knows this is partly how a masterpiece such as Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch was made. According to Coiffec, this was also how Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception was conceived and I would not be surprised since it may very well be my favourite game in the whole franchise.
Sebastien Renard, the Writer, says the idea for White Night existed long before the foundation of Osome studio — pronounced awesome studio, not Ozome. History would tell us that Coiffec got the idea because while working on the Alone in the Dark remake, with its dark manor and frightening creature, he watched a short film anthology named Fear(s) of the Dark and was really scarred by the short made by Richard Maguirre.
Having written about Renaissance I find this really interesting. See Renaissance was released in 2006, and based on a concept short made in 1998, while Fear(s) of the Dark was released in 2007. Maybe one day, I’ll write another Trail of … This time focusing on French genre projects in black and white. With that being said, I once saw Matthieu Fremont acknowledge the filiation between White Night and Renaissance. Another recurring influence appears to be ICO.
Osome studio was named after the OEngine, which is a homebrew engine developed by the two programmers on their spare time. Interestingly enough, this engine was used by another studio Passtek Game in order to develop their own space sim. The creation of the studio also led to Coiffec leaving Dontnod even though, he had forced them to give him a position of art director, on the first Life is Strange nonetheless !
But the dream of having his own company, of answering solely to himself and his two companions was too big. According to each of the founders, the bigger a company gets, the less responsibility and risks it takes. Every choice has to go through screening from multiple hierarchic ladders which makes for a poor execution in the end.
Their bet was clear, to have little money, but little-to-no employee except themselves and make a game cheap and fast. Using mostly the resources they already possessed but also some elbowing to the contact they already had in the industry.
Quickly enough, they settled on a story taking place in the 30s, a film noir aesthetic and an old-school survival horror genre, meaning there would be tank controls and fixed camera angles. The deep black and white style gave them the ease to not have to detail every piece of furniture, which made for significant time gain. And time is money. A money they preferred to spent on audio design. I’ve seen multiple founders saying they were amazed by the minutiae with which their sound mixer worked on the sound of lightning matches. According to some at 3AM in his own flat when circulation was non-existent outside.
At first, the company worked on the three men personal funds, but they quickly acquired a grant from the CNC — a French organ helping the funding of audio-visual projects, led by the state. But it’s through their GDC appearance that the studio took his biggest leap. See, the studio which didn’t have a lot of money set up a booth by buying furniture from thrift shops all around the convention and trying to recreate the ambiance they were aiming at. All they had at the time was a concept video. An Activision employee stumbled upon it early in the morning and before they knew it, they’d signed a contract with probably the biggest publisher in the whole world.
To be fair, White Night and its unusual aesthetic had already garnered a reputation, and some prices, which proved it as a genuinely good investment. From then on, the studio was able to gain access, for two days only during which they shot over 150 sequences — to Quantic Dream mocap capture, probably the best thing there was at the time, in France at least. Soon, the three-men army was crunching in order to release their games not only on Steam but on PS4 and Xbox as well. Working on timed contract for some outsourcing.
Nowadays, it’s funny re-threading the interviews they gave at the time of the release of their games — almost seven hours of content for 10$! Through them you can see that all they wanted was to build other original cool ideas but history would go on to tell us that their next game would be an Asterix & Obelix XXL 2 & 3.
Stay tuned for next week we gon’ talk about Marcel Schwob, the French Scheherazade!
