Interview with Alexandre Leboucher

How did Agharta Studio come together?

For 1112 the team was made up of ex-coworkers from Étranges Libellules. When I moved to Lyon, I started working for bigger gaming companies and met a lot of very skilled people already in the industry. Working with them for a couple of years made me want to have another go at indie development with a small team. 1112, Shufflepuck and Rouge Planet were quite good for a three-person team!

I still have a very good relationship with the 2D artist Valerian Taramon. We were actually roommates when we were working on 1112.

Why was Episode 04 eventually cancelled?

I wanted to take a break after Episode 03, when I created Shufflepuck. That was really cool to do. I think the success of Shufflepuck Cantina was also responsible for the delay of Episode 04. The other members of the team wanted to make small VR games but I wanted to finish 1112 instead. We disagreed and I left Agharta Studio to begin working with Arkane Studios on the Dishonored games instead.

The disagreement was somewhat cool, as we didn’t want to force members of the team to do things they didn’t want to do. They didn’t really like making adventure games like me, so I couldn’t force them. In the same way, I wasn’t forced to stay, and I preferred to accept an offer from Arkane Studios. Working on the Dishonored series is really cool too! Actually, Valerian Taramon and I were on the same page, and he left a little before me due to a personal matter.

We needed around 100–200k to make a game like 1112. At Arkane Studios we see fifty-million budget games, but I don’t have the same liberty I had with my own company. Still, I can do a lot and that’s cool, but I do miss being totally independent.

The existing games were never converted to 64-bit for newer macOS and iOS devices. Were there any plans to do this?

It’s really a shame that Agharta Studio didn’t find the time to update the games to 64-bit. The developer told me that he basically had to recode the entire game in Unity to make it compatible.

Are there any future plans to finish the series?

I’ve been working with Arkane Studios for five years now, but someday I’d love to finish the series. The idea would be to make it a full game with all of the chapters running in high resolution. The first three episodes would be remastered with extra content, plus Episode 04, and made available on Steam.

If I manage to secure enough funds then I might still do it by paying contractors on the side while working at Arkane. I really miss making my own games. This might be after completing work on Deathloop, planned for release on May 21, 2021.

I would try to use the original backgrounds and paint over them to add a new level of detail. The characters are already good. They would just need a re-scale and some detailing, which I guess would be enough.

I guess I’ll just have to ask Agharta Studio whether they will give me back the rights to 1112, but I may have to release the game under a different company name. Still, there is a lot of work to do for a remaster and the last episode, especially because we are in a 4K generation now!

The music from the first two episodes, composed by Dimitri Pachkov (Odessae), is very unique. Can you tell us more about the soundtracks?

Dimitri Pachkov is actually just a friend of mine who also happened to be my neighbour at the time. I remember that the track “Falling” from the first game was sung by a friend of mine.

I have a recording of a guy I met in the middle of Brocéliande in Brittany. I was working on Episode 02 on my MacBook and he started playing the accordion. I loved what he did, so I asked if I could record it for the game. That’s why there’s a nice accordion part in Episode 02.

A character named Léon was teased on your Twitter for Episode 04. Was he planned to be the pyromaniac from Fade?

Actually, I was planning to rewrite the entire asylum part from scratch, similarly to what was done for Episodes 02 and 03, which barely existed in Fade. I did enjoy the story of Fade at the time, and the idea behind 1112 was to take a similar story and expand it a lot. I wanted to make one of the largest adventure games possible. I had planned a gigantic Episode 04 to finish 1112, as large as the first three episodes combined.

You also sent us artwork for a nurse character. Can you tell us more about him?

His name is Matthew and he will/should be in Episode 04. He was one of the nurses at the hospital. The hospital was actually my favourite part of Fade, so I wanted to take lots of ideas from it for Episode 04. I would make it more interesting of course, but I never had the time to rewrite it!

Many people have asked whether Louis was based on Johnny Depp. Is there any truth in that?

Louis is a mix of both myself and Johnny Depp! I was not “heroic looking” enough, so Valerian Taramon did a kind of mix of the two of us.

Most of the characters in the game are based on real people that we know. I used a lot of my friends, and there are a lot of real background stories in each of the characters too! For Episodes 02 and 03 we used a lot of family members for the older people. It was quite the collaborative project. Lots of private jokes in the games were about friends impersonating characters, like all the drunken people in Episode 03, for example.

The original version of 1112 on the App Store featured fully animated characters. This was later dropped because it became too costly. In the end I preferred having more characters and less animation, so we only kept animation in the eyes and mouth.

On your old Tumblr you shared screenshots of a version of 1112 designed for the DS. Can you tell us more about it?

The concept didn’t get any further than a home emulator. I didn’t have a company at the time and I was working at Étranges Libellules on a Spyro game. The art design of the DS version was more “hand drawn”, but it only went as far as the first couple of rooms in Louis’ home.

It was at this time that I realised the App Store might be better suited to the game, and boy was I right! We caught the beginning of the App Store craze and the game got good press in French publications. We were unlucky with our US reviews, weirdly. They didn’t like the quality of the English, if I remember correctly. We took that on board, and the script has been improved a good number of times by US fans.

Was there much of a budget for Fade or 1112?

Fade was all made in our spare time; there was no budget. Episode 01 of 1112 was actually the same. We paid for Episode 02 and all of our other games using what we earned from the previous ones. There was no money injection at all, no investors, which was kind of cool!

For Fade, it was my student roommates who did the programming, plus a 3D artist friend. I was doing 3D work at the time too. The team became known as the “Fade Team”. We also created another adventure game called Acedior and a card game called Exit Nights.

What inspired the story for Fade?

The story wasn’t inspired by anything, to be honest. I was a big fan of the film Memento at the time, as well as David Lynch movies. I loved the way the story of Fade keeps surprising players. With 1112, I would have tried to twist the ending another way if possible, as the whole “AI fight” was a little weak in retrospect.

There were lots of “reboot” opportunities in the story, like New York in Episode 02. I would have tried to better explain the AI fighting to keep the players asleep, as after all, they are just dying alone in space. It’s a cool and dark ending in a way, but it should be more fleshed out. For example, Louis could ask the AI to go back into the simulation to die in peace.

Why did the Fade team choose the Pocket PC as a platform?

Well, I was always a technology enthusiast, and each time promising tech appeared I couldn’t resist! At the time Pocket PCs were very promising pieces of tech, well ahead of everything else. They were the precursor of the iPhone, to be honest.

At the end of Fade there is a “To Be Continued” screen. Was there ever a plan to continue the story?

I actually have no memory of that. I think I was around 20 years old at the time. It was all a gimmick, because at the time we weren’t sure what we would do.

Fade has several nude scenes and an Easter egg showing two characters nude together. Do you remember this?

What? Really? I have absolutely no memory of that! I don’t have much of the art for Fade left, to be honest. I remember the characters were exported from Poser at the time, so it might not have been a deliberate thing. I completely forgot there was any nudity in the game.

Nudity was a little less sensitive at the time and I was very young. Now that we’re talking about it, I remember there was a sacrifice scene in Chapter 5. I’d completely forgotten about the Easter egg.