Valentin Serri

🫶 announcement 🫶 🎙️ my @narrascope talk ‘Building a Desirable Future is Not an Individual Heroic Effort’ is now up on youtube! want to hear about the collective mind and the narrative tools to propose post-capitalist futures? 👇👇❤️‍🔥👇👇 youtube.com/watch?v=hIob-d… 👆👆❤️‍🔥👆👆

MAINFRAMES IS OUT NOW It’s cute ✨ It’s fun 💾 it’s weird 🧙 PLAY IT NOW

ce vendredi à l’occasion des Enjmin Game Conferences, je donnerai une conférence sur le thème comme élément fondateur du world building et participerai à une table ronde sur la création de petits jeux 🎙️📚 🌐

Keep Driving, our management RPG about life on the open road, is OUT NOW! [on Steam] 🌍 Explore an early 2000s setting 💥 Unique turn-based 'battle' system 🔧 Strategic resource management 👋 Pick up folks along the way 🚗 You’re young, you have time… 🎵Sound on!🎵

prepping a new talk atm🫣 good occasion to share the talk i gave at @narrascope; it’s about desirable futures in games: brief overview of how capitalist realism manifests in games and what narrative tools we can use to go beyond conservatism and escapism youtu.be/hIob-dHRNeo

i’m there too, feel free to follow 🌞

Don't forget to submit your work for the 2025 A MAZE. Awards by January 31st! 🦩🏆 Register here: 2025.award.amaze-berlin.de #AMazeAwards #AMaze2025

You were right! Wednesdays mostly looks and feels like a visual novel. BUT...

🙇 thanks for reading! and here’s a link to INVISIBLE MOUTH itch io page: valentinserri.itch.io/invisible-mouth

and of course, a bit cliché but expressionist movies were a great source of inspiration for shapes and contrast

simplicity and elegance of theatre set design

🎨 Pierre Soulages, light work in dark setting

no tops or whatsoever this year for me: i just wanted to make a tiny post-mortem of INVISIBLE MOUTH, the tiny game i’ve crafted for @AMazeFest game jam in 2024 ⛓️‍💥🏙️ #gamedev #gamejam #indiedev

🎞️📚 Sin City, for the shadow work and lighting acting as a narrative device

🎨 Giorgio De Chirico, for the shadow work and the ethereal beauty of the settings

photos of the Tate Modern for the big rays of light piercing through the building

✨ next are some of my inspirations to create the city of INVISIBLE MOUTH: 📸 Ernst Haas, his street photography work on american cities and contrast

i guess it somehow was about reclaiming my love for the craft and not only selling it as my workforce it was also a good excuse to mark the occasion of my first @AMazeFest and display my game in a space full of radical and experimental artistic expression! 🫶

in my actual narrative design role, i don’t have many occasions to get my hands in the engine… so, achieving a small game alone at that time was also some kind of proof to myself that i still can express myself artistically, alone, within this interactive medium

working on a big scale game is daunting, especially when it pursues a commercial goal 📈 and in most cases, you can’t fully express yourself, especially when you pursue some kind of radicality!

when working on this projet, i felt it was doing me good 🧖 i’ve been musing a bit on how important this was for me to work alone on this project as a full-time video game worker integrated in the ✨industry✨

time to wrap it up, a bit of digital music composing, a bit hard to find my voice in there so i went full atmospheric long synth waves, no loop, just a +10min long music 💆 still wanted to polish a few things, fix bugs, and integrate UI for the title page, but time ran too fast

the atmosphere and the game feel were getting good, it was time to set myself on writing! main guideline was: enjoy yourself 💆 then i added one small restriction: 4 lines maximum! 🤜 punchy lines that would highlight the characters motivations to resist and protect their city