Pierre Corbinais<\/span><\/a>\u00a0has been writing for and about games for a decade now and he is the writer of Haven. He\u2019s mostly known for Bury Me My Love, a reality-inspired fiction about love and exile, and \u2018Til Cows tear us apart, a two-cowgirls\u2019 road-movie in space but also created a lot of other small games during various game jams. Haven is the biggest project he worked on so far (and he can\u2019t wait for you to play it).<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s your opinion about romance in video games? What is good and bad, from your point of view?<\/b><\/p>\n
My main opinion about romance in video games is that we don\u2019t see enough of it, and when you think about it, it\u2019s actually a bit baffling. Romances are everywhere except in video games: I don\u2019t know about the other countries, but in France, every year without fail, the best selling novels are love stories. Turn on a mainstream radio and there\u2019s a fairly good chance that a love song will be playing. And romance (whether it is comedy or drama) had always been one of the strongest film genres: While released more than 20 years ago, Titanic still is the third highest grossing film of all times (#1 in France!), how crazy is that? Everything points to think that people LOVE romances, but a bunch of exceptions aside, we don\u2019t have romance in games, at best we have flirting (in dating sims or RPGs). Why is that? There is this idea floating around that video games are mostly played by men and that men aren\u2019t into romance, but I think both these assumptions are untrue. To me, the main reason why there is so few romances in game is that we, game creators, still don\u2019t really know how to make them. It\u2019s \u201ceasy\u201d to make a game where you shoot people (\u201cIf bullet collides with enemy then enemy = dead\u201d, but how do you program a game about falling in love? Being in love? Falling out of love? Everything must be rethought, reinvented. That\u2019s a tough job, and a lot of work, but what a great challenge!<\/p>\n
Where would you like to see the genre go? What kind of romance story or style would you like to see in a video game?<\/b><\/p>\n
I would like it to go in every directions, form-wise and content-wise. There are so many different love stories to tell, and so many ways to interact with them to invent. Just try to imagine how every video game genre could be twisted to become a love story: What is a First Person Romance? What is a relationship management game? A heart racing game? A love puzzle? \nAnd we\u2019re not even talking about the new genres that might emerge. \nAs for the content, there is a subreddit called r\/relationships where people share relationships stories (romantic or not) to get advice from the community. I love browsing through the posts there. They are sometimes funny, sometimes grave, sometimes relatable, sometimes just plain weird\u2026 I think these posts tell a lot about what being human is, about what loving is, and I\u2019d like every single one of them to be turned into a video game.<\/p>\n
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Haven has quite a modern treatment in terms of dialogs, compared to traditional RPGs. Was it difficult to come up with that? How do people react to that style?<\/b><\/p>\n
Haven\u2019s dialogue style came up pretty naturally. While you can find some epicness in the game, I felt it was more about the little things, the daily life, and I needed the dialogues to reflect that. Yu and Kay shouldn\u2019t talk like badass-and-somehow-also-super-witty heroes, they should talk like us, with our hesitations, verbal tics, cursing\u2026 I\u2019m really into alternative comics that tell \u201cslice of life\u201d stories (Hernandez brothers\u2019 Love & Rockets, Terry Moore\u2019s Strangers in Paradise, Vanyda\u2019s The Building Opposite to cite a few), I probably draw this style of writing from there. \nI didn\u2019t get the chance to see a lot of people playing the game so far so I\u2019m yet not sure how people will react to that style, but the team and voice-actors seemed to like it! The very first dialogue I wrote to try out that style and see if it fitted the game ended up becoming Haven\u2019s first scene.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a lot of humour in the game. Do you think it\u2019s a way to make the players have fun or to make them get attached to the characters?<\/b><\/p>\n
Yes, people usually enjoy to laugh and smile, so why not allow that? But humor is also a useful tool for Haven\u2019s narrative structure. In Haven there are a lot of dialogue scenes that aren\u2019t there to make the story advance toward an ending. They\u2019re just slices of life meant to create attachment to the characters, chill moments spent in the Nest. How can you satisfyingly end such scenes that don\u2019t really lead anywhere plot-wise? There aren\u2019t that many solutions: You can end it with something cute, something deep, or something funny. Juggling with the three is the best way to keep the player surprised, and thus entertained.<\/p>\n
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Do you have a special process for writing dialogs? What\u2019s your one advice for writing dialogs?<\/b><\/p>\n
Writing is a very weird and personal thing, the more I talk with other writers the more I realise there aren\u2019t two writing processes alike. Some people will tell you that you need to precisely know where your dialogue is going beforehand, me, I tend to just go with the flow and let the characters decide for themselves. Most of the time, when I start writing a dialogue scene, I have no idea how it\u2019s gonna end. This is a terrible thing to do when you work in movies for example, because movies only lasts 90mn and you don\u2019t have one minute to spare. But I think it works pretty well with video games, especially when you want your dialogues to branch in different directions: not having an ending in mind is a great way to allow the emergence of multiple ones. \nAs for the advice I will give this very simple one: whenever you\u2019re stuck in your writing, drop your pen (or keyboard, or typewriter) and go outside. Walk. Sit in a park. Have a coffee (and don\u2019t forget your notebook in case the inspiration comes back). Breaks aren\u2019t a waste of time, sitting in front of an empty page is.<\/p>\n
Finally, everyone wants to know. Are you more a Yu or Kay person?<\/b><\/p>\n
I put a lot of myself in both characters, Kay got my poor sense of humour and Yu my terrible sense of direction, but I\u2019m probably more a Kay person overall. Yet, when playing the game, I mostly play Yu. Go figure.<\/p>\n
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Pierre Corbinais\u00a0has been writing for and about games for a decade now and he is the writer of Haven. He\u2019s mostly known for Bury Me My Love, a reality-inspired fiction about love and exile, and \u2018Til Cows tear us apart, a two-cowgirls\u2019 road-movie in space but also created a lot of other small games during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Interview with Pierre Corbinais, Haven's writer - The Game Bakers<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n