Sébastien: Désiré is a point & click adventure game. The main character, called Désiré, is colour-blind and sees the world in black and white.
Antoine: The story revolves around Désiré's life and his quest to put colour back in life. Sébastien and I worked on the backgrounds together and we shared the work. It's a little bit like having a sketch artist and a colourist working together on comics. Background creation started with reference photographs but we also had artistic references from comics, people like Mignola and Toppi, as we are fans of their black and white work. Once we have our references, we start the drawing work in earnest. We draw perspective lines, sketch volumes, always bearing in mind game design, as every background underpins the story, contains puzzles to be solves and must allow for fluid navigation of the characters. Once the backgrounds are fully sketched out, I pass them on to Sebastien for inking.
Sébastien: So I get the sketches from Antoine which I then finalise using pen and ink. Once they're inked, they're ready for colorisation.
Antoine: Colorisation is the process of adding colour except that in our case, it is based on a grayscale. Then we separate each layer of the background. We let background components stand out, emphasized in black and white.
Sébastien: When Antoine has finished the colorisation, I cut out, I add grain and texture and I give life to the backgrounds by adding light. When this is done, I give the background to Sylvain who adds them to the game. So when the character is integrated into the backgrounds, we use layers: these cutouts, placed in front or behind the character create depth. When the character moves in front of these objects, the illusion of 3D space is created although the original drawings are in 2D.
Antoine: We would love to add more assets, refine our backgrounds and make then even better, and for this, we need you. We need a successful Indiegogo. Breathe life into this campaign, support us and share this video.
