Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Microids who worked on Amerzone The Explorer’s Legacy.
Microids Studio Paris : Microids Studio Paris is an internal studio of the French publisher Microids. Led by Antoine Villette and built upon the foundation of the team behind Syberia: The World Before, it specializes in the production of AA narrative adventure games (notably within the universe created by Benoît Sokal) and regularly provides support to other Microids studios and partners.
Lucas Lagravette : Game and Narrative Director on Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy and Syberia: The World Before, I contributed to oversee the design, deployment, and maintenance of our pipeline in articy:draft for both titles – with a particular focus on localization, narrative design, and features/game design, alongside my amazing teammates Chloé Duretti and Romain Pierson. We worked closely on a daily basis with the teams handling the other parts of the pipeline – namely the fantastic teams led by Adrien Laurière (Level Design/flow/integration) and Loïc Bigot (engine/tools/gameplay programming).
Articy: Amerzone The Explorer’s Legacy is a modern remake of the 1999 adventure game with the same name. Aside from stunning visuals and gameplay upgrades the remake also enhances the storytelling and deepens the narrative. What can fans of the original game expect in terms of new content?
Lucas: We’ve expanded on events and characters that were only briefly mentioned (or entirely absent) in the original game, by adding new gameplay situations and plenty of environmental storytelling elements. We also introduced an “investigation” system that allows players to record the lore they uncover and connect the dots to give it meaning. This gradually unlocks draft versions of newspaper articles written by our player character, deepening the narrative.
Finally, speaking of this avatar, we chose to tell the story entirely from his point of view-in first-person, with occasional body awareness – while keeping him as unobtrusive as possible, as a tribute to that beloved “Gordon Freeman-style” storytelling so iconic back when the original game was released.
Articy: You also used articy:draft for Syberia – The World Before, are there any changes in the way you used articy:draft between the two games?
Lucas: Since Syberia: The World Before, we’ve adopted an almost “total” use of articy:draft – we use it not only to manage narrative and localization, but also to drive the entire game logic and flow, thanks to the bridge between its data exports and our custom features and tools in Unity. With the experience gained from that first title, we rethought our data structure for Amerzone: The Explorer’s Legacy, strictly separating narrative/localization content (the texts), narrative logic (especially branching), and overall game flow. Each layer calls on the others using links and articy:draft’s feature “strip” system. We also improved the granularity of our data exports (particularly to Unity, which we now only use to handle the most micro-level logic, such as certain puzzles) and greatly refined our localization workflow using articy’s template system.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Lucas: articy:draft helped us bring more structure and discipline to our development process thanks to how extensively we used its ecosystem. It also spared us from having to develop too many custom tools from scratch (for narrative, flow, localization…) and allowed us to build expertise by refining our use of the software across two consecutive AA productions.
Articy: Any learnings or tips you’d like to share with other users?
Lucas: articy:draft is a rich and flexible tool. The possibilities it offers are vast and can be adapted to almost any need. That’s why I strongly recommend carefully analyzing and designing your pipeline needs before diving in. Structuring – especially your data – is key here, and if done right, it can unlock countless possibilities. “With great power comes great responsibility” ^^ – and that’s especially true here!
For some specific needs, the articy team developed excellent custom plugins for us – perfectly functional and always supported when needed. A huge thank-you to the folks at articy, especially Peter Sabath and Jan Frese!
Amerzone The Explorer’s Legacy is available on: Steam Epic Store GOG Playstation Xbox
