Blanc,developed by Casus Ludi, is a cute and accessible co-op game set to arrive on Valentine’s Day. One of the first things anyone will notice aboutBlancis its incredibly distinctive visual stylethat was achieved through hand-drawing with pen and paper. The nameBlanc(meaning “white” in French) is certainly fitting for a game built upon a white canvas, and the deliberate lack of color adds to the charming handcrafted look that permeates throughout this precious multiplayer adventure.
In an interview with Game Rant, Casus Ludi CEO Florent de Grissac spent some time discussinghow creative constraints are a useful tool in the creative processand talked about the various challenges these constraints posed to the development team. Particularly, the black-and-white color scheme and the decision to go with a text-free narrative were both difficult limitations to work with, though the result certainly appears to have been worth the effort.
Blanc’s Text-Free Design Forces The Game To Communicate In Other Ways
The decision to makeBlancwithout any words comes with a variety of challenges and benefits, and it certainly couldn’t have been easy to carry out a story without text to help explain what’s going on. As shown by othergames that effectively use silence, a lack of words shifts the narrative responsibility to environmental storytelling and context clues, which can lead to surprisingly powerful moments.
It’s a challenge, and it’s a challenge that we choose knowingly. We knew that we wanted to try it. The challenge is that you have to think of other ways to convey the stories and narrative than just words, obviously. And this is a very interesting challenge. Apart from that, it’s just a constraint that we choose. As you know, constraints in creativity are just frames that you choose for yourself. It brings a unique aspect to the creation. I’m very happy that we kept this choice. To be perfectly honest, at first, we wanted to be very, very hardcore with this choice, and we tried. We tried to design a game without any text. I mean, no menu, nothing. In the end, this was too much of a challenge. So there are menus, there are hints on how the game should be played, but no text for the narratives.
Although the idea of a menu without any text is an intriguing experiment, gamers will probably be glad to read a few helpful gameplay hints, and it’s difficult to think of ways an options menu could be presented clearly without some words to describe each function. Telling the story without any text, however, has the benefit of making the story understandable regardless of background. Other than a few tips and menu items, anyone can still appreciate the tale.
Blanc’s Black And White Visuals Are Unique, But Challenging To Work With
The most obvious constraint Casus Ludi chose when developingBlancwas its black-and-white color scheme, which is at the core of the game’s authentic pen-on-paper appearance that helps it stand out immediately from other games. Although this has resulted in an iconic style that plays a major role inBlanc’s identity, developers at Casus Ludi encountered a few issues when working out the game’s visual presentation.
For instance, we wanted this world to be not a winter world, but a world in spring or summer that has been covered by snow and should feel unexpected. While birds can be black and white, you can’t make your red apples in the trees or red flowers. That limits our ability for us to make this environment feel odd or to feel strange, but we try to anyway. The other point is visual fatigue for people. It’s white most of the time as the name of the game suggests. Some people told us that it was not easy to have this white screen in front of them for a long time. With adjustments and iteration we tried to have something that is not too tiring for people, yet everyone has a different sensitivity to this kind of visual effect.
Since color is such an important tool for identifying objects, it’s especially important for the game’s design to be legible.Blanc’s environments and character design appear to have pulled this off rather well, and players shouldn’t have much trouble differentiating between objects in the game world. As for the potential for eye fatigue due to the white background, hopefully, this will just be a helpful reminder to take healthy breaks and manage screen time, but players will know soon asBlanc’s release dateapproaches.
Blancreleases February 14 on Nintendo Switch and PC.
