Nominee | Nuovo Award

Created by Titouan Millet

Each year at GDC, MFA students from the NYU Game Center interview the Independent Games Festival nominees, asking them three questions about their development process. In addition to this interview, you can read all the insightful interviews from 2017 here. These conversations, and much more, will happen when the Game Center returns to GDC in 2018. Learn more about the Game Center at GDC 2017.

Burgess Voshell: What was the concept, image, or question that began this project?

Titouan Millet: Well initially it was just an experiment, a visual experiment with shader stuff and it just looked cool and I wanted to work further on it to make it more than just a visual aesthetic tool and make it an actual game. It is actually, at the same time a visual tool and a game, also turns into a story.

Burgess Voshell: So informed by something like an aesthetic exploration…

Titouan Millet: Yes it was the main challenge of this game was to put everything into the same piece of work.

Burgess Voshell: Can you describe a specific experience with another game or media that informed you as you worked on Mu Cartographer?

Titouan Millet: I don’t know. I wasn’t really inspired by other games. Maybe Mirror Moon. It’s a game where you have to learn to use an interface, interact with a machine. It’s quite the same as Mu Cartographer. Like the game is to learn how to use it. So there is no tutorial, no indication whatsoever. You try to learn how to manipulate it, how to read the machine, to use it so you can find stuff in the world.

Burgess Voshell: Yeah, it’s a task of interpretation and testing of the tool itself.

Titouan Millet: Yes.

Burgess Voshell: Is there a specific tool or methodology that you used in the making of this game that contributed to a unique characteristic of how it turned out?

Titouan Millet: I used Shader Forge a lot. It’s my favorite tool in Unity. Nodal programming to create shaders. It started with me trying to show stuff in Shader Forge to other people and it began like that.

Burgess Voshell is an artist, designer, and MFA student at the NYU Game Center.