Indie Narrative Painters
Hey welcome to something different. Usually you know me for gaming news and maybe one or two funny posts but today I'm here with a new and hopefully long running series of Interviews! Here, I talk to Geoffroy Vincens from the French Indie studio Nova-box!
You might know them for games like 'Across the Grooves' or End of Lines'. On November 10th they're launching their next game 'After the Wane' and I thought this is the perfect opportunity to talk to Geoffroy about his work, Nova-box, occult themes, government funding and more!
Could you introduce yourself and your studio?
Geoffroy Vincens (GV): Hello, I'm Geoffroy and I'm a writer. I take care of most of the dialogs and texts in our games, as well as the integration.
Nova-box is a small indie studio, based in Bordeaux, France. We've been making and publishing narrative games since 2013. Our core team is quite small: there's Nicolas Fouqué, our art director and illustrator, Raphaël Le Bobinnec, our dev, Antonio Davisseau who's joined us last year on marketing and communication, and, of course, me.
On a typical Nova-box game, you can add about a dozen of regular part-timers who help us with music and sound design, illustrations, proofreading, or English localization, most of which we've known and worked with for a decade. For 'After the Wane', we also had the joy to work with several professional dancers both for consulting and performance capture.
You guys are working mostly on interactive graphic novel game, which I would call pretty niche, what keeps you on the same genre?
GV: Nico and I are both old enough to have grown up with the first wave of "Choose your own adventure" books, which is a form of writing that fascinates us. We're also big comic books enjoyers. The kind of games we make are at a crossroad of many of our interest and artistic aspirations and we feel there's still a lot to explore in this genre.
Nico and I (…) have grown up with the first wave of 'Choose your own adventure' books, (…)
Most of your games took one year to develop until Covid, has it something to do with how you guys make games or is it just bigger scope?
GV: While Covid definitely had an impact on both the end of production of 'Across the Grooves' (released in 2020) and the start of 'End of Lines' (2023), I'd say it's a conjunction of different factors indeed. Scope is absolutely one of them. We try to stay reasonable but, passionate and invested as we are, we end up biting more than we can chew time and time again. There's also the fact that none of us are getting any younger, so we have to pace ourselves more than we used to.
I know that games made in France can get government funding, from Video Game Support Fund (FAJV) for example. Is Nova‑box using it or are the games self-funded?
GV: We're indeed very lucky with public funding for video games in France! They're a big part of our sustainability. I guess it's one of the perks of being from the country of the Cahiers du Cinéma and the Cinémathèque. We have benefited from some sort of public funding for most our games, mostly from our local government. The région Nouvelle-Aquitaine (i.e. the area where Nova‑box is located) runs a grant program for video games creators since around 2017 or 2018, which has helped us immensely over the years. We've also got funding from the FAJV you mentioned in 2017 for our title 'Seers Isle' (2018). Since then, we've been only relying on the Nouvelle-Aquitaine grant, as it's enough to reach the cap we're allowed to receive.
Your newest game has some horror elements in it, how are you approaching this kind of content?
GV: I wouldn't qualify 'After the Wane' as properly fitting the horror genre. What I mean by that is that gamers coming to us looking for proper thrills, gore, or jump scares might end up being quite disappointed. There's indeed a healthy amount of tension in the narrative to keep things interesting, and we're touching on occult and supernatural themes, but I suppose this particular title is more rooted in urban fantasy, with a pinch of magical realism.
Is there any kind of media which players should consume to understand your games better?
GV: Our games are quite easy to pick up and enjoy, being mostly reading experiences. If you're asking about our influences, I suppose it depends on which member of the team you ask, as we have a wide panel of distinct tastes and inspirations.
For my part, I mainly take inspiration from cinema and literature. For instance, 'After the Wane' has a bit of a similar vibe with the cinema of Julio Medem. He's a Basque director, who's a master of the ellipsis as a narrative device, coupled with a frequent exploration of the theme of synchronicity in his screenplays.
Occult and supernatural themes sounds pretty interesting! Can you elaborate on that and what was the inspiration behind those themes?
Well, I spent some time in this particular rabbit hole when I was younger, so the occult is something I quite like exploring in our stories. As for the inspirations precisely, it would be hard to pinpoint. I really love what we call "speculative fiction" and I've been diving into this wide "umbrella" genre across all medium all my life. What I can tell you is that, contrary to what seems to be the dominating trend, I'm usually not a "hard magic system" person. In 'After the Wane', as in most of our games, the irruption of supernatural isn't baked in with a logical, rigid set of rules you can learn, but more of a looming force of nature that is, in essence, unknowable. The world is a weird place, and our stories are a testament to that.
In After the Wane (…), the irruption of supernatural isn't baked in with a logical, rigid set of rules you can learn, but more of a looming force of nature that is, in essence, unknowable.
If you'll allow me, rather than trying to find the most direct inspirations I may have had for this particular game, I'd like to take this opportunity to share what I think are criminally underhyped works of fiction, across different medias.
A movie: A Dark Song (Liam Gavin, 2016). This is the most accurate representation captured on film of what it would look like to perform the Abramelin ritual and what would happen if it worked. It's a low budget movie, so don't expect lush and polished visual effects, but the documentation is pristine, and the characters development surprisingly deep and original.
A book: Hollow (Brian Catling, 2021). Mediaeval existential horror at its finest. After been a painter most of his life, Catling turned to literature in his senior years. He published Hollow right before passing away in 2022. It is the first book of a series that will remain unfinished. I can almost guaranty you've never read anything like that.
Brian Catling
A comic book: Lost at Sea (Bryan Lee O'Malley, 2003). Before releasing Scott Pilgrim, his massively successful comic book series, Bryan penned this graphic novel, which is surprisingly insightful and introspective. To me, it's a wonderful slice of life sprinkled with a hint of magical realism.
Bryan Lee O’Malley
'After the Wane' features different endings based on the players choice. I always ask myself, has the writer behind it a favorite ending/outcome and how they're preventing themself from treating it special and give every ending the same amount of "love".
GV: There's no right or wrong way to tackle a branching narrative, it depends on the writer preference and the story they want to tell, with a taxonomy not very dissimilar from "plotters" (who make a very detailed outline) and "pantsers" (who write as they go and fix by editing) for novel writers.
(…) I usually go the other way, by baking the branching narrative deep in the themes and writing every branch in parallel.
Some interactive fiction writers prefer writing one version of the story, then add the branches later, but for my part, I usually go the other way, by baking the branching narrative deep in the themes and writing every branch in parallel.
On the one hand, it fixes the issue of having a favorite narrative path while helping immensely on the global consistency of the story. On the other hand… it forces you to write sequentially from start to finish (which I don't mind) and it gets harder and harder to progress as you have to juggle with more and more variants as you go. It's kind of a "digging your own grave" situation, but a challenge I really enjoy puzzling over nonetheless.
After the Wane
Release: November 10 2026
Lena is a starry-eyed young dancer with big dreams, but as soon as she sets foot in the capital, she finds herself at the nexus of a lifelong quarrel between Fernand, the elusive director of a community center, and Deborah, who’s leading the troupe of a strange and exclusive theatre. Does it have anything to do with her mother, a dancer too, who abandoned her when she was a child?
Torn between her past and her future, Lena will need to rediscover her own nature and forge her path forward as increasingly strange events unfold around her… but the strangest of all might be the permanent commentary of a voice that she seems to be the only one to hear.
Developper: Nova-box
Publisher: Nova-box
'After the Wane' launches on November 10th between Ocarina of Time and GTA VI. Indie games and Triple A games have difference audiences but I'm curious: are you nervous launching next to these behemoth games as an indie studio
GV: Well, it won't be worse than our 'End of Lines' debacle of 2023 when we end up releasing between Tears of the Kingdom and Diablo IV after having to postpone the game announcement (back in 2022) because Microsoft decided to buy Blizzard the exact day we were supposed to announce the game.
Back in 2016 (…), there was only a couple hundreds of titles getting on the platform each year. Now it's a couple of hundreds a day.
Finding a release window has been quite a challenge for a few years, with more and more titles releasing. Back in 2016, when we published our first Steam game, there was only a couple hundreds of titles getting on the platform each year. Now it's a couple of hundreds a day. I don't think there's a perfect window for a small studio like us, not anymore. It's always a bet. This time we've decided we were way less afraid of GTA VI than the dozens of double and triple "A" games that were afraid of GTA and decided to release between now and mid-October. Let's hope we made the right bet this time.
Any word you want to give to the readers that they can take with them? About your games or in general?
GV: I suppose this the moment I speak on the behalf of our fellow indie devs. As you may know, the world is now governed by automated algorithms, and while the barrier of entry to put a video game out there has never been lower, it has also been more and more difficult to raise above noise and make a living with our craft.
So, if you want to help us survive, please do all the things creators ask you to do: wishlist the game, share the word with your friends and online, and of course, please buy the game during the launch discount, which is the only sale that is actually good for the studio and leave a (positive) review as soon as possible.
Thanks to Nova-box for the incredible Interview and for the thoughtful inside in their work. Also a big thank to you for reading it. I hope you liked it. I will be back with another one end of September. If you have any feedback or if you want to talk about popculture you can join our Discord.