GAME CARAVAN: À bientôt!

Game Caravan is a one-week international mobility program (i.e. study trip), created as a bilateral cooperation between Serbia and France, at the invitation of the French Institute. Actors of the game development community and industry from Serbia had the opportunity to connect with peers from studios and schools in specific parts of France, while the French experts will also be guests of several professional events in Serbia during the next year in the (co)organization of SGA, including the conferences Unreal Day, Video Game Studies and For the Win!

France is one of the leading European countries when it comes to the development of video games, as well as expertise in other creative and technological fields such as video effects, computer graphics or animation. As many as 18,000 people are employed in the industry, and regional centers, associations, accelerator programs and events are held across the country. Through the Game Caravan program, we wanted to get to know some of those regional centers, whose individual video game industries usually exceed the size of the entire industry in Serbia, while the relevance and recognition of the projects emerging from there is global.

Thus, the pilot edition of this special mobility program was realized between November 4th and 8th of this year, and the caravan from Serbia visited Lyon and Montpellier, and got to know the key actors of the local gaming communities in these cities and their associated regions. But who joined the trip in the first place, and why them?

We brought along representatives of faculties and indie studios from Serbia: from Niš, Vršac, Novi Sad and Belgrade. Four professors received direct invitations, while members of local studios had a chance to apply to an open call announced back in October. A group of eight representatives of the Serbian game dev community headed to Lyon on November 4th, and in addition to the SGA as “road leader” of sorts, we were accompanied by Vukašin Šoć (Academy of the Arts in Novi Sad), Nikola Stojanović (Faculty of Electronics in Niš), Vanja Todorić (Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade), Milan Ličina (Metropolitan University Belgrade), Ištvan Jung (Foxy Voxel, Novi Sad), Luka Glavonjić (Untitled Studio, Belgrade) and Anđela Mihaijlovski (Flat Hill Games, Vršac).

In less than five days, we managed to visit a number of faculties and studios in two French cities, as well as to be part of two community meetups. We were met with an extremely warm welcome and had the opportunity to encounter the studios behind numerous successful games. Among them were New Tales, Game Bakers, Wild Sheep Studio, Pastagames, DigixArt, Tiny Digital Factory, Gameleon, Passtech and Old Skull Games

Our little caravan moved much faster than it would have had we really chosen camels as our main means of transport, so already on Monday we got to visit the first university in Lyon – Bellecour. From the next morning, we had a packed program of visits and meetings, which left almost no time for free activities, but resulted in our group functioning perfectly and managing not to miss any of the planned activities. Plus consuming vast amounts of fun along the way. In each of the schools, we had the opportunity to see the latest reels of their students, but also for our professors to exchange information about how the programs are implemented and to connect for the sake of more concrete cooperation in the future.

Most schools have separate majors for fields such as concept art, animation, computer graphics or game dev, while in senior years students usually participate in collaborative projects. We were also impressed by the numbers: most faculties enroll hundreds of students each year, while some of the schools have their centers in several cities across France. In this way, the academic sector successfully supports one of the largest video game development industries in Europe. What students in Serbia should keep in mind is the fact that practically all faculties of this profile in France are privately owned, and that tuition fees range between 6,000 and 9,000 EUR per year.

In Lyon, which is the second city in the number of employees in the industry after Paris, we also visited the Brassart, E Art Sup and Emile Cohl schools, the latter particularly impressed us with its beautiful and functional building, but also with its insistence on the craft aspect of artistic disciplines and mastering of key skills. During the first three years, all their students still have full-day lessons in traditional sculpting and drawing, and only later do they start using digital tools in project work. Of course, they are taught digital skills by highly experienced professionals, often coming from world-renowned French animation and game development studios.

Colleagues from the regional association GAME ONLY helped us organize our stay in Lyon. They, like the SGA, bring together studios and actors from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. On Tuesday evening, they arranged an informal meetup for us in one of Lyon’s bars, and the very next morning we visited the last two studios (Old Skull Games and Passtech), and headed straight to the train station where we jumped on the Spanish high-speed train that connecting Barcelona and Montpellier. Montpellier was exactly our next destination.

In the style of a rock band on tour, immediately after arriving in Montpellier we went to visit the first faculty, the impressive building of the ESMA school, which has been running for 25 years. Montpellier is first and foremost a student city, with a great emphasis on faculties in the domain of creativity and technology. ESMA is another school that is present in several French cities, and their modern building is equipped with all the infrastructure needs for filming, special effects and more, including professional studios and all the necessary equipment.

The impression is that Montpellier, a beautiful town less than 10 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea, has the perfect mix for the development of creative startups: the combination of heritage and modern architecture, the quality of life, the presence of faculty and a large number of students who, after years of professional career in large studios or abroad, return to the city and start their own independent companies. That’s why there are dozens of them out there today, and their founders usually have 10 or 15 years of experience working at Ubisoft and other big companies, in France, Canada or Asia.

But more on that the next morning. Wednesday continued, and we went straight from ESMA to Tropisme, a large cultural center where we had a joint event with PUSH START, another regional association covering the Occitanie region. We were also welcomed by Mrs. Valerie Chaillou from the city administration of Montpellier, who is in charge of the development of creative industries. That fact alone speaks enough about how strategically Montpellier sees an opportunity to brand and position itself as a city where creativity flourishes, but also develops through globally successful small businesses. The Occitanie region takes up 8.8% of the total game dev production of France, but it is still larger than the entire Serbian gaming industry.

After an extremely pleasant evening and socializing with about fifty representatives of faculties, training centers and studios from Montpellier, the next morning we had the opportunity to meet a few small, motivated studios that work in the unique and pleasant environment of this city. The morning coffee was prepared for us by Emeric Thoa, co-founder of the Game Bakers studio. We were especially delighted that we had the opportunity to try a demo of their new game Cairn, unique in that it transfers the experience of adventure, survival and hiking into the digital domain and does so very successfully, through beautiful graphics and inventive game design. A few weeks later, the demo is now officially available on Steam.

We walked through the center of Montpellier to reach a beautiful town villa with a garden filled with tall palm trees, olive trees and a beautiful pond bordered by thick rows of bamboo. Now it was clear to us that the sea was close! Two studios – Wild Sheep Studio and Pastagames – are based in this beautiful house. As they mainly use the Unreal Engine, we were glad to be able to boast that MetaHuman technology comes from Serbia, as well as to have Unreal Day every year, and to feel that what is happening in Serbia is relevant even in the context of an industry that has more than thirty years of tradition.

Thursday was the last day for visits and new acquaintances, and we made the most of it, just as with all the previous days. We visited the campus of the famous ArtFX school, and saw dozens of classrooms and hundreds of students, while in the corridors we were surrounded by posters of Hollywood blockbusters on which their many alumni worked. At the end of the day, before we got back on the train that would take us back to Lyon airport, we had also visited the Digix Art studio co-founded by Yoan Fanise, winner of several BAFTA awards for the game Valiant Hearts, while working at Ubisoft, and then realized a great success with his studio on the game Road 96. What is certainly felt in the artistic approach of most of these games and we have not mentioned it so far is the strong tradition of comics in France, whose center is the city of Angoulême.

We hope that in one of the next Game Caravan missions we will have the opportunity to visit it, and until then we will have a handful of good impressions, warm welcomes and contacts through which we will create new connections between the gaming communities of France and Serbia. À bientôt!

Photo credits: Game Caravan participants