Post Script

Raphaël Toulouse, creative director and co-founder, Paper Cult

Back in 2014, Raphaël Toulouse and his friend and collaborator Michaël Emond founded Montreal studio Paper Cult. They were looking to prove themselves: Fat Mask was their first game, a basiclooking but mechanically inventive arcade puzzle brawler that won them the government grant they needed to set their sights higher. Bloodroots is the result. Here, Toulouse discusses making the switch from filmmaking to indie dev, and the dangers of wearing too many hats.

We weren’t aware of Paper Cult as a studio before Bloodroots. What’s the history there?

Before being in videogames, I was working in cinema for about five years. And I always had in my mind that I would switch to videogames at some point. I was fed up: you need a giant team to make a big movie, like you need to be at least 50 or 75 people. And I didn’t like the structure. So that’s the reason I decided to switch and do games. I had the opportunity to work as a designer right away in a small indie studio, doing a mobile game. I did that for about a year-and-a-half, but I felt like a fraud, so I decided to do a one-year programme in design at university – but what I really wanted was to find someone with whom I could start a studio afterward. I think on the second day, I met Michaël [Emond], and I knew right away. I was pretty straightforward with him: ‘Let’s start a studio.’ We made our first game, Fat Mask.

But we were working at another studio while doing it: it was mainly meant to prove we could ship a game and get some funding. So then we finally had a studio: a team of six in-house, and a couple of freelancers.

Where did the idea for Bloodroots come from?

At the end of university, we brainstormed about 50 ideas. Michaël and I were prototyping about a project a day. We did that for a month. At the end of the month, we had around 30 prototypes: we did some voting and decided, ‘Okay, we’ll do this one’. Bloodroots was one of those ideas.

Your background in cinema is very apparent in the game’s style. From which films or directors did you take the most inspiration?

We were inspired by Quentin Tarantino, and how he makes his movies: he kind of does, like, a patchwork of many influences and inspirations. There’s obviously a lot of Tarantino in the aesthetics, but the story is inspired by Kill Bill. There’s some Samurai Jack also in the visuals – for the gameplay, one of our main inspirations was Jackie Chan. You know how Jackie Chan uses everything around him as a weapon? We wanted to make a game where you’re constantly shuffling from one weapon to the other.

Also, I was inspired by music videos, because I did a lot of them when I was in cinema. You want to change the pace like every five, ten seconds so that you keep the attention of the viewer. We felt that the genre which we were in, a lot of the time after like an hour, you’ve seen pretty much all the content. But we wanted to keep surprises throughout the game, so that’s why we have so many different weapons – there’s over 150 of them.

The ‘perfect timing’ isn’t overtly explained in the game – what exactly are the conditions that need to be met to trigger the finishers?

The game is pretty straightforward – like, there’s no tutorial, you pick it up and it’s pretty instinctive. But that’s one of the things where we were unsure, but we kept it in the game because we thought it was interesting. When you’re in reach of an enemy there’s a little circle under them. Right when it appears, if you attack, you get a perfect timing – but it’s like, 0.2 seconds. And when you do a perfect timing, you get a small speed boost, so it kind of dashes you forward towards your enemy. It’s a bit made for, you know, speedrunners, so they can have a small edge against each other.

The thing about having a small team is that, me and Michaël mostly, we end up doing so many jobs at the same time

After three years of development, how are you feeling? Would you change anything, looking back?

I have the blues of finishing a project, but I’m really proud of what we achieved. If I had to do it again – first off, it would take like, half the time for sure, because I already know what the game is. We were in preproduction for about a year. At first, we had a parkour system a bit like Assassin’s Creed, and we scrapped that after a year of development [laughs] so we had these kind of crazy things. The thing about having a small team is that, me and Michaël mostly, we end up doing so many jobs at the same time. And I think we hear that often from indies, but I don’t think it’s said enough that it’s really not a good thing to be wearing so many hats. We didn’t have a full-time designer, so the design was improvised a lot of the time. Having a full-time designer right from the get-go would have spared us that Assassin’s Creed parkour system, for example. It’s a budget thing, also. Having a producer would have been amazing.

What does the future look like?

The next project is a bit different – completely opposite to Bloodroots, in fact. It’s Michaël’s idea: it’s a narrative game about being a cat! [laughs] I think it’s a good thing that we’re not just making Bloodroots 2 right away. The nice thing about being indie is that I don’t feel it’s a dangerous business model to change from one genre to another.