Article by Matt S.
As our regular readers would know by now, last week we launched a Kickstarter to fund the production of a book on the topic of games as art.
And core to that book will be interviews with some of the games industry’s most prominent artistic game developers. With that in mind, I thought we would do a series of developer profiles to introduce you to some of the developers that you’re perhaps not as aware of.
If you want to hear more (much, much more) from these developers, then please do back the Kickstarter; it will provide you with some genuinely unique insights into how games are made, straight from the minds of the developers that make them.
Guillaume Provost has been building games for many years, and has been working at some big studios. He started out around the year 2000 at Pseudo Interactive on titles for the Gamecube PlayStation 2 and Xbox, including Cel Damage, Cel Damage Overdrive, and Pariah. He also oversaw the release of Full Auto and Full Auto 2 – early release games for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
After spending some time on project management, Provost then decided to step back into being directly involved in game development and founded Compulsion Games in 2009.
It took a while, but Compulsion’s first game, Contrast, was released last year, and it’s for this game that we approached Provost to participate in The Interactive Canvas. A deeply personal work for Provost, Contrast represents a creative freedom; the ability to release a game too abstract for a big studio to take a risk on it.
We’ve got a full review of the game, which you can read here, but in short what we liked most about the game was the way it distorted perceptions, and forced players to look at environment and game spaces in a unique manner.
In our interview with Provost we’ll talk about precisely that theme, but also what inspired the dark narrative, his fascination with the carnival aesthetic – which runs throughout Contrast – and how he develops the ideas for his games.
If you’d like to hear Provost’s story – and that of many other game developers – be sure to back our Kickstarter to score yourself a deluxe hardcover collector’s book.
– Matt S.
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @digitallydownld
