Gamifying the Little Things: Camille and Laura Developer Olivier Bouchard Discusses Making Subtle, Sad Games
Olivier Bouchard, the solo developer behind the label BonjourBorzoi, makes one thing clear at the very top of his website: that he makes sad games. After feeling touched by his most recent release, Camille and Laura, I spoke with Bouchard about the creative process behind the game and where he might go next, in addition to writing about my own experience playing the game. The interview — conducted via email — has been lightly edited for clarity.
The headline on your website simply states “I make sad games” — why is this something you enjoy doing?
That tagline comes from my first business card.
Generally, the naïve art of my game is the first thing people notice about it. It's kind of an "in" to the player before they're hit by the realities of what the game is about. That contrast has always been an important thing for me and is what I wanted to present in this business card. The juxtaposition of the tagline with the silly looking giraffe (which comes from my first game, A Game About, but is also in one of the Camille and Laura background artworks) got positive reactions from people and the tagline stuck.
My first games are about representing life without the usual fantasies video games use. Plenty of games talk about parenthood or mental illness or such issues, but they tend to do it while resorting to fantasy or metaphor ([e.g.] God of War, Gris, Sea of Solitude, etc.). I really wanted to take a more subdued approach to similar themes. One thing that comes out a lot in my struggles and friends' struggles is that life does not stop for you, and life can be funny, sad, absurd, overwhelming, etc., all at once. I always make a point of trying to not hide the humour for fear of diminishing the drama, nor would I do the opposite. I want them to coexist in the same story beat.
As such, I like the "I make sad games" tagline. It feels kinda cheeky in how direct it is while staying true to a general feeling players had with my game.
As for why I enjoy doing it, it's more of a unique approach that I've found that works for me and seems to resonate with people. With my own struggles, I've found that not many games were presenting them in a way that resonated with me as much as it could (they were resorting too much to metaphors, as I expressed before) and I wanted to do something in a space that didn't feel as crowded. I don't think I'm the only dev in that space (Wednesdays is a good game from this year that fits the bill too), but I feel we're rarer.
Bouchard’s business card, which is labelled with the tagline, “I make sad games”.
Why was Camille and Laura made to be a subversion of children’s cartoons?
I was working in the localization industry here in Montreal as an assistant editor while I prototyped the project. Most of our clients were children shows, as they tend to get localized in a lot of languages (we had projects being localized in as many as 26 languages). Sometimes I would work a full week watching and rewatching the same few episodes of children cartoons and I think it started imprinting on me.
I've found their logic to be fun (the way Camille and Laura walk up the hill before the school is straight out of Peppa Pig) and fit my approach.
The way they represent adult life, especially, was very interesting. Children can be discerning, so the absurdity of adult life can feel very potent in how they look at it. Sometimes, too, it felt like the workers of the children's shows were just putting gags in there for themselves or for the parents watching the show.
My working on those shows was the jumping board for the game. It also gave me an opportunity to have a unique style that I could make solo, my art skills being limited.
Other than the stated children’s cartoons on your website, what other inspirations are there for Camille and Laura, and why did you want to make it?
The other clear inspiration is the movie Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Akerman. It's a very important movie to me that is interested in the mechanics of routine. Video games being a mechanics driven medium, I always found that it would be a perfect medium to explore similar themes.
I personally struggled with chronic health issues, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue for the last eight years. It's the biggest reason why I wanted to make a game about daily life: my goal was to make a game that shows how a "normal" life can become a struggle on its own, worthy of its own "drama" even though it looks unremarkable from the outside.
The single mother angle came partly from Jeanne Dielman, partly from my childhood. It afforded me to represent the exhaustion in a more concrete manner than I could've using chronic health issues as the theme of the game. It also gave me the child character (which is very much inspired by me as a child) that could create interactions but also show what still matters for these characters through these struggles.
I ended up with mostly women characters because I feel women tend to be tasked with more free labour in our society and that felt in line with what the game was presenting. It's certainly the case in my social circles.
I assumed that the aesthetic was intended to bring the game’s perspective more in line with Camille’s. Is my assumption correct? (Or rather, why did you choose this game’s aesthetic to be the way it is?)
You're absolutely correct. With what I expressed earlier, it ended up coming naturally.
The gag of having the kid showing a drawing to her mother and then the graphics being exactly like that drawing is one of the first things I wrote for the game.
The premise of following a single mother and her daughter is unique, and the execution is very tender. Please could you share to what extent Camille and Laura is a personal story to you, and how much of yourself you see in this game?
It's very much inspired by my realities of health issues but also my childhood, as I mentioned earlier. My parents were divorced for as long as I remember, they weren't single parents per se but I've seen their life separately.
The kid herself is almost all me. I didn't have a lot of budget so doing research out of my own circle of friends was kind of out of the question.
I was very much a calm and silent kid that was introspective very young. I remember my parents wondering about what was going on in my life and what I was thinking about and how I'd communicate that to them. That's how I wrote Camille and her views on adult life matches my own at that age.
The most obvious example is school: I did not understand why school was a thing, why I needed to be there and why people were asking me questions about how to write words that I wasn't sure how to spell. I remember my parents struggling to explain the concept to me, and a lot of that ended up in the game.
Were there any challenges to the game’s development that you’re willing to share?
I received a small grant to make the game, but it was mostly made solo in about a year with a strict deadline, which came with its own problems.
After receiving the grant, I did not know how realistic it was to make a "full game" at that time. I hoped to make a game that would go from Monday through Friday and would be about an hour and a half long, but for the longest time I expected to be forced to reduce the scope a fair amount. The backup plan was the game to be three days (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) or even less.
I did have to cut some content but the "whole story" I had planned is there, which I'm pretty happy about.
That being said, it also meant that I made the game "at full speed" for a whole year. There was very little iteration. The art style and the relative simplicity of the mechanics afforded me to not need to prototype that much, but it's still not a good way to make a polished game. There's definitely some inconsistencies and small issues that I wish I could've anticipated better if I had more time (the kitchen interactions is the biggest area where iteration would've helped clean everything, I think).
It's also almost impossible to do proper marketing by yourself while developing a game. Marketing is a full time job for a reason and I did not have the budget to hire someone. I did a few events (Comiccon and MIGS in Montreal) but being present there would stop the development altogether.
I think my game does well when people see it or actually play it — I have a better than average conversion rate — but getting people to see it is really hard. It's also a problem in how to present how "unremarkable" the story is, the pitch is not as catchy as a more fantastical game pitch can be.
Making a game is really hard in general, making it solo is exhausting!
Has making Camille and Laura given you any ideas about what you’d like to do next? I.e., if you were to make another game, would it look similar or completely different?
I'm working on a few prototypes! I'm about 80% certain of what my next game will be! It'll be very different conceptually, but I think all my prototypes are very obviously "artsy" in approach. For all the problems that can come with solo development, the great thing is that I can make my games as weird and off-kilter as I want and, for now, this is something I want to lean on. I want to make something a little more mechanically driven — both Camille and Laura and my previous game were narrative first — but I think it will still be very unique in the current gaming landscape.
