We’ll be working on a review for The Spirit and the Mouse, so I got in touch with Alblune to talk a bit about the game. Come check it out!
PS4Blog: Good morning! Thank you for joining us today. Could you please help us get started by telling our readers a bit about yourself and your work?
Hello everyone! We’re Alblune, a small indie company based in Montreal! Our team is composed of two people, Lucie Lescuyer and Alexandre Stroukoff. We’ve been working in the gaming industry for ten years. We both started as 3D artists and evolved into more technical roles. Our careers started in France, where we worked on a broad range of projects, from console games to mobile games (Ubisoft, Gameloft, and more), working in teams of various sizes ranging from AAA studios to small indie companies.
We moved to Canada six years ago and kept working and learning as much as we could in other studios. All this experience allowed us to gather a broad set of skills that are proving very useful when making your own indie game! Making our own games has always been a dream of ours. After working on lots of small projects, we started working on our first game at the beginning of 2020, called The Spirit and the Mouse!
PS4B: On that note, The Spirit and the Mouse is ready to go on Nintendo Switch. What can you tell us about the game?
The Spirit and the Mouse is an exploration-adventure narrative-driven game in which you play as Lila, a mouse helping villagers in a small town! After a shocking meeting with a spirit guardian called Lumion, Lila finds herself in possession of this spirit guardian’s electric abilities, leaving him powerless and stranded on earth! She and Lumion have to work together now to restore balance in the small town of Sainte-et-Claire.
We made this game with the intent of creating an accessible game for all ages! This means no violence and accessible gameplay. One of our top priorities was also making sure we crafted a place where the player would feel safe and relaxed.
PS4B: How long did it take to develop The Spirit and the Mouse? Were there any hurdles or challenges you had to overcome along the way?
It took us around two and a half years to finish the game. We were not working on the game full-time during the whole development, so that certainly added a bit of a challenge to the production! Though I would say the most challenging thing was to design a game around exploration without a jump button. You have to think about the world from another perspective! The game also features quite a lot of narrative, and even though we are a small team, we tried our best to have an engaging presentation with cutscenes and animations to immerse players the best we could. We hope that you will enjoy the unique world we created!
PS4B: Any chance you might be considering releasing a digital (or physical!) art book/making of book for The Spirit and the Mouse detailing its development?
Hahaha… that’s a good question! I’m not sure we have enough concept art and visual material worthy of that, but you can be sure we’ll share threads and post about the development in the following weeks! We have lots to share about the way the game was created, but it’s easier for us to do that over gifs and videos! We still have the idea of making a small making-of video to share our creation process – if there is an interest in it, of course!
PS4B: And now it’s time for us to go. Is there something else you’d like to add before we end this one?
Not much to add, we’re very proud of the game, and we hope everyone who played it had a good time!
