by Gabriel Durnerin

Artwork: Jiahui Eva Gao[Flashback: Lucy, written by Gabriel Durnerin, is the second installment of the Flashback series created by Baptiste Derrez and Marc-Antoine Doyon and published by Scorpion Masqué. The first installment, Flashback: Zombie Kidz, won the 2023 As d'Or in the children's game category.]

Genesis

The Lucy project began for me in April 2022. At that time, I was mainly working on two role-playing projects. I received a message from Christian Lemay, the founder and then boss of Scorpion Masqué, late one evening on Messenger. (Well, late for me; in Québec it was 4:00 p.m.)

I knew Christian because I'd met him several times at game conventions in the early days of Scorpion Masqué (at the time of his early game Climb!) when I was working for Matagot, then later when I was a project manager at IELLO. I had "poached" him so that IELLO could distribute Scorpion Masqué, and we worked together for several years. We got on very well, with a sincere mutual respect.

So it was a pleasure to see this message appear at 11:00 p.m. on April 4, 2022.

A certain Marc-Antoine Doyon was also part of the group. I knew him only by sight, thanks to his "Es-tu Game?" review YouTube channel and his role as jury member for the As d'Or. He was to manage the project they wanted to talk about. He introduced me to the concept of Flashback and the first box (in the Zombie Kidz universe), which was in the final stages of development at the time. They were looking for someone to write the second box, betting on the success of the first. The theme was to be "youth horror".

(A note from Marc-Antoine: For the new volume in the Flashback series, we wanted something a little more mature, but not too mature, something that kids who loved the first box would be able to appreciate as an adventure that would grow with them. Being a mega-fan of horror movies and games, I pushed for something along the lines of Goosebumps. As we wanted to work with a new designer for this box, Christian quickly suggested Gabriel, who seemed ideally suited to bring the seriousness and magic that the project required.)

Of course I wanted to come on board! Cool people, an ambitious project, a refreshing theme...I said yes immediately.

Within the hour, I received what they had already created for the first game: The demo scenario, the first finished scenario, and the next two scenarios still in development. I tested it alone in front of my PC, and I was convinced.

The next day I spoke to the two people involved, and ten days later I met the whole team: Baptiste, Marc-Antoine, Christian, and Manuel Sanchez, the head of the studio. I pitched them a few ideas, and the project was launched, with the aim of completing the writing by the summer.

The History

The first challenge was to establish what the story would be. I had to respect the theme of youth horror in the style of the Goosebumps books. I initially had the idea of four independent scenarios, playable in the order of the player's choice, each exploring a horror cliché with a common narrator character (in the manner of Guillaume Montiage's Suspects, for example). But the Scorpion team preferred to keep the structure of the first Flashback: a long story that develops over several scenarios in sequence.

(Marc-Antoine: One of Flashback's strengths is its ability to create links between the different scenarios. From memory, it was also important for us to stand out from other narrative games by offering a linked story with a beginning, middle, and end.)

Of all the horror classics, I concentrated on the haunted house. The idea soon arose to explore this house in different eras. Five ideas emerged:

— Young people exploring the abandoned mansion, in the style of thousands of horror films. I quickly set it in the 1990s as a tribute to Buffy. This would become the first scenario, which eventually moved into the 2010s.

— Professional ghost hunters, a cross between the Warrens of the The Conjuring films and the Ghostbusters, where the idea would be to play on pretenses: The ghosts (and players) are made to believe that all is well, while behind the curtain everything is going wrong. This eventually led to the second scenario, set in the 1970s.

— A film set in the 1930s, Ed Wood-style, that would have been in black and white, with actors disguised as monsters and monsters pretending to be actors. I let this concept drop as it would have duplicated the structure of the previous one.

— A trip to Dr. Frankenstein's mansion for a tribute to 19th century gothic/romantic horror. This resulted in the third scenario.

— A trip back in time to the Salem witch trials and a whole story involving a cave in a cliff inspired by the Locke & Key comic strip. This cliff gave Cliff Manor its name, but has disappeared from history. The rest gave rise to the fourth and final scenario.

Once these foundations had been laid, I needed a link. That's where Lucy was born, a teenager with mysterious powers who, if she touches an object linked to a dead or missing person, is able to revisit their last moment. In this way, I could bring players into the game.

Artist: Jiahui Eva Gao
The second link between all the scenarios is the villain! The idea arose of a Shadow who slips in everywhere, whose intentions are unclear and who would be a source of fear for some and of fascination for others. This character was pretty much inspired by a role-playing campaign I'd designed for friends in Brussels, and aesthetically, I had in the back of my head the 1990s video game Heart of Darkness.

The details of the scenarios came only over time. I wrote the first scenario, and only once I'd agreed on the basics with Marc-Antoine did I move on to the second. Nothing was set in stone for the rest of the story, which meant that I was able to modify the storyline as I went along and came up with new ideas.

The Present

From the outset, the idea behind the game's structure was to take players through a series of flashbacks, each distinct from the other and increasingly distant in time. Between each flashback, that is, each scenario, I wanted to try to move the story forward in the present, where it is discovered by the game's protagonist, Lucy. This "present" was subject to many modifications.

I wanted to create an additional scenario that would have been a pack of extra cards set in the present. In each game, players would have had two decks: the present common to all games, which would grow over time, and the past specific to that scenario. Discoveries in the past would allow Lucy to act in the present to better understand the past.

The idea was cool, but bringing it to life was laborious and, above all, the testers didn't react well to it; cards from the present were forgotten or mixed up with the past or conflated across the eras, creating misunderstandings. In short, it didn't work.

In the last third of the writing process, the idea emerged for the comic strip that is now in the game: Lucy's discoveries are narrated by a small comic strip that players interact with before the vision (to see how it was triggered) and afterwards (to see what Lucy discovered in the mansion during the vision).

(Marc-Antoine: Indeed, after several playtests, the fifth scenario didn't work — but we quickly became attached to Lucy, and the idea of the recurring theme seemed to meet all the needs of the game. Treating the fifth scenario as a moment of respite between adventures — a neutral zone as in many video games — seemed a good option. We placed the cards on a fixed page, and it worked. The comic book idea was born.)

The Mansion

To create the mansion, I first drew up a floor plan based on old blueprints I'd found here and there. I then placed the characters on the plan while writing the scene description on a Word file.

The plan of the mansion obviously changed as I went along (for example, the "petit salon" no longer exists), but it was important that the mansion remain the same in all the scenarios so that players who managed to mentally project themselves into it could find their bearings in subsequent scenarios. Once a vision had been established, the rooms that appeared had to stay in the same place for the rest of the story, with only the unknown rooms being allowed to move.





The Cards

Illustrated cards are the heart of Flashback. Each card represents a vision of a character frozen in the scene. For my part, I used text to allow the artists to project themselves into the scene, putting in all the details I needed to make the scenario work. This example is the first draft of the first card in the first scenario, although it then moved several times:




Marc-Antoine then came in to make a 3D model of the manor and give every character their perspectives, that is, what they would see from their locations.

This was then passed into the hands of storyboarder Jérôme Mireault. As in films, he made quick, efficient drawings without details so that we could project ourselves into the final image before having it made by the artists. That gave us a testable version of the design before soliciting the final illustrations.


(Marc-Antoine: The main difference compared to the first Flashback game was that since the scenarios all took place at the same location, I was under the impression that 3D modeling would be simpler. That was a big mistake because from vision to vision, we were going into different rooms, in different eras, with different props and characters. The house is complex and deep, so every step of the way, we'd discover a new closet or staircase. In one scenario, there's a piano. In another, a telescope. Each scenario has its era and each era its challenge.)

The Gadgets

One of the key elements of Flashback: Zombie Kidz were the gadgets, the hidden elements in the box that gave a new perspective on the game and on the cards, and handling them was a pleasure.

For Lucy, we went through several stages. For a long time, I tried to ensure that the gadget would be the same in every scenario — a pack of transparent cards — but used differently each time. In one scenario, the transparent cards would be placed on top of the cards to change their visuals. In the second, they'd be used in a "lamp", which would have projected visuals onto the cards to alter their content. In the next, they'd be placed in a zoetrope to form a film. Finally, they'd be used for perspective games, a bit like the old On the Dot game, but in 3D.

The lamp soon disappeared, Manu having made it clear after a few months that we wouldn't have batteries in the box. The zoetrope was far too expensive and took up far too much space in the box. Too bad...

The transparent cards slowly but surely slipped into the graveyard of ideas, but it all led to the final result — which I won't reveal here, but which I think is super cool!


My beautiful zoetrope prototype
Illustrations and Finishing Touches

The illustration process involved a lot of people as Laure de Châteaubourg and Jennifer Mati drew all the backgrounds for the cards and the comic book, and Jiahui Eva Gao created all the characters, with everything being based on my texts corrected after testing and the storyboards.

The backgrounds were designed first, and the characters placed on them later. For my part, I didn't co-ordinate all this work (kudos to Marc-Antoine), but I did take part in several meetings with the set artists in particular to agree on what should and shouldn't appear, the angles of view, the moods, etc.

(Marc-Antoine: Co-ordinating a whole team in four corners of the globe is no easy task, but we managed, and I'm grateful for the flexibility of everyone involved. Thank you, Gabriel, for being such a good ally and (Lucy's real) dad. For posterity's sake, I'm going to say I'm her mom.)



Artwork: Laure de Châteaubourg


Hervine Galliou also did a fantastic job with the graphics, the model, and the secret gadget, so cool, well done to her!

Then came the long production time and back-and-forth with the factory, which I followed only from a distance, before seeing the finished product appear. There was more than a little stress at the first test to see whether everything worked — phew, it was all good! — and before I knew it, the game was arriving in stores and on players' doorsteps.

I hope my game brings you as much pleasure as I had making it with this great team! If you want to see even more of the creative process for Flashback: Lucy, here are the illustrators' Art Stations: 

— Jiahui Eva Gao
— Jenny Mati
— Laure de Chateaubourg